Who Has Been Eating My Chair?

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … Lawn chairs are for lawn-sitting quite at our ease / Soft summer evenings with a book and a glass / With birds and squirrels chittering away / Merrily over their supper of chicken scratch

Read More

Send Them Your Dawn, O Lord

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … We repudiate Putin and all his works / And all his pomps and all his engines of death / And all his malignant servile orcs / Who crucify humanity with lies

Read More

Oh Mother of the Holy Offering

By Amanda Pizzolatto … Oh mother of the Holy Offering / How patiently you wait for the light of day / In silence you bear your suffering / For you know death will not keep Him away

Read More

The Shape of a Poem, the Shape of a Life

By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … Yes, they are awkward, those poems written in shapes / But if God writes our lives as poetry / Limned and formed for our continuation / We ask that He shape us with clarity and charity

Read More

Everybody Writes a Poem About the Moon

Everybody writes about the moon / Often trying to force a balky rhyme / Along the continuum of spoon and croon / Which just won’t fill the bill, the quill, or the time

Read More

Wake Up, Back Yard!

Brave seedlings from last year’s sunflowers arise / Among the tiny wings of zinnia buds / And the pushy skunk cabbages who hang around / Like playground bullies who ought to go find jobs

Read More

On the Consumption of Art

But we do not consume a work of art / Sometimes we almost seem to marry it / Joining art in a sacrament of love / Beyond the velvet ropes of ownership

Read More

All Intelligence is Artificial

No, no, we are not banks of blinking lights / And random teletype-type taps and beeps / Like Patrick McGoohan’s educational General / Or George Jetson’s mainframe at Spacely Sprockets

Read More

People of the Book

The Thought became Incarnate in Judaea / And thoughts become incarnate in the books we read / For thoughts are tabernacles of our hopes / Tents in the deserts of our wanderings

Read More

For Jack On His Birthday

In the long ago I was reading a book / (And doubtless thinking many brilliant thoughts) / Sitting in my car outside Our Lady’s Church / Waiting for some old-lady meeting to end

Read More

Memphian Lamentation

Let us instead look within our fatal selves / With every resentment validating the Fall of Man / With every snub murdering Abel again / With every lie sentencing Christ to death

Read More

Tolkien’s Shelob the Spider

A poisonous lump of flesh in malignant repose / Her lair all befouled with scraps of souls / In life sought out with her multiplex eyes / Her Sauron-eyes – it was the hopes that died first

Read More

The Machine Pauses – Three Days in ICU

Oh, isn’t it awkward being passed along / Up and down confusing, fluorescent-lit corridors / From receptionist to nurse-practitioner / To technician to physician and back again

Read More

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Pickup Truck

The fragility of teenaged boys is well known / Despite their tough hands stained with oil and grease / And their slouch and their ‘tude, wanting to be grown / Their loud voices disturbing the classroom’s peace

Read More

The Christmas Puzzle

Oh Christmas crib, oh Christmas crib, / What a privilege you were blessed to have / From you food to animals was given / And now you carry the Bread of Heaven / Oh Christmas crib, oh Christmas crib, / What a privilege you were blessed to have

Read More

Children Following the Star on Christmas Eve

Good children dress warmly to watch for the star / The star of Bethlehem, the shepherds’ star / The star of the magi, true-guiding star / And more than all of these, the children’s star

Read More

Word Sung as Light

A deep, slow stream of tones, of modes, of chants / Where time and all eternity flow as one / Through voices and dreamlike echoings / Among the Altars of the earth and sky

Read More

Open

Open your eyes, look around you / What are the things you see? / The world is a great big, scary place / But oh the wonders there will be!

Read More

A Tiny Tinsel Star

While cleaning house I found a tinsel star / A tiny tinsel star from long ago / When once upon a time it shone so far / Above a Christmas scene in cotton snow

Read More