In Honor of Hagia Sophia
Our eternal Constantinople is
Never to be lost, never defeated:
In every Christian flows Dragases’ blood
Every village is the Holy City
Every church is Hagia Sophia…
Tag: Lawrence Hall
Archaeology, or, Digging Holes in the Ground and Finding Stuff
…This season’s gardening at my rural estate along Jasper County Beer Can & Garbage Dump Road 400 has been similarly rewarding in matters of archaeology, only without any human remains….
Read MoreOn Reading Thomas Merton
To read Thomas Merton, we are scold-told
Is middlebrow spirituality*
I never knew that a brow was involved
Because I see the barber every week…
Decolonize Your Bookshelf? No.
There is a fashion – and as fashions come, they go – of decolonizing one’s bookshelf. The idea is that the reader should self-interrogate his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) cultural influences and determine if they are not right, not approved, not liked. Or, as Pasternak’s officious, oppressive, busy-body Soviet Deputy says, noticed.
Read MoreSummer in the Garden
Summer is better in theory than in practice:
Watermelon days barefootin’ in the shade
Pole-fishing for perch in the neighbor’s pond
Oak-tree afternoons lost in a library book…
Romance of the Barren Plinth
They’ve gone and pulled a general down
And all the birds that used to rest
Upon his visage fallen to ground
Will have to seek another nest…
Church-Time in Virus-Time
Trinity Sunday – a cosmic leap indeed
From the second week in Lent until now
We bless ourselves with holy chemicals
And the awkward elbow-bump of peace
The Class of 2020 Has Met Adulthood Already
Some high school graduates are in the top ten per cent of their class, and that’s good enough for them, but I was in the top eighty percent of my class, and eighty is a higher number than ten, so their. Or they’re. Or something….
Read MorePentecost and Drifting Smoke
A mighty wind has passed, an ashen wind
It was not the Wind we were waiting for
Nor yet again Holy Wisdom’s tongues of fire
But only Babel’s burning ziggurat…
Shakespeare Aboard the Enterprise
While isolated in my rural estate here along Beer Can Road and County Dump Extension I have been dragging hoses, reading Robert Frost, saying bad things about the ‘possums pillaging my vegetable garden, and considering Star Trek…
Read MoreThe Dancer on the Garbage Truck
He lightly leaped from the old garbage truck
Waved back at me, and sprinted to the bin
He Fred Astaired it as a pas de deux
And lifted it up with panther-like grace…
A Haircut!
A haircut today – my Wolfman look is shorn
The virus-time follicles set to rights
Follies and follicles, the locks of lockdown
A-tumbling down in coarse, unseemly waves…
Sunday Morning Tornado Watch
This is the only thing normal today:
A tornado watch on a Sunday in spring
I have shifted those famous Loose Objects
Into secure areas as best I could…
Draggin’ Hoses on St. George’s Day
Drag those hoses when the weather is dry
April’s grass is paling, and oak leaves wither
All the new plantings cry for a drink of water
And the rains of winter have now retired…
Dear Patrick Stewart
Thank you for reading us Shakespeare each day –
Sonnets from your balcony and from the stairs
Smooth flowing iambics from all your chairs
Precise pentameter to smooth the way…
Now They are Imprisoned Twice
We cannot volunteer in prison now
The grids and grills that shut the prisoners in
Now serve to shut most everyone else out
And bars now bar us from teaching each other
Logotherapy in the Virus-Time
I search for God within my books
Just as I scan the sky for Him…
With a Dog and an Oxygen Tank
An old man with a dog and oxygen tank
Steers his duct-taped golf cart to the café
For the morning liturgy at his corner seat
The vinyl cathedra where he presides in state…
Holy Saturday in the Virus-Time
Holy Saturday in the Virus-Time
Sure, there are empty churches, but…
Evening – Palm Sunday
The waxing moon knows nothing of Holy Week
And stars care nothing for sacred liturgies
Nor do the fireflies flitting among the trees
And ‘round the darkening lawn as evening falls…
LogoSophia Magazine 