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Splintered bones set hard, out of place.
I limp among those I cherish, gripping onto furniture, before I sit, defeated. From the crucifix, your steadfast eyes say, What’s mine is yours. To offer this pitted stone—my heart—is pain; but you do not take a hammer. Quiet light penetrates, halos me, burns the muscle-memory that mires my feet. How cheap the word miracle—one step, and now immersed in grace, I stride, serene, across the river’s bridge. The agony was always yours. The pasture greens. Your breath is holy. I fill my lungs. -- Emma-Jane Peterson writes for magazines in the US and the UK, where she lives. Her poems are published in BoomerLitMag, The Clayjar Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Metphrastics, Penstricken, Black Nore Review, Prosectrics and Pure in Heart, among others. She is the co-author of a book of children’s Bible stories (Parragon).
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Clumped among the frothing mounds,
flung onto shore, a tiny wholeness in baby bib overalls, awaits the finding: this is what you have for me. Brush away the flies—shoo now, gull! unweave fingers of emerald, garnet, opal seaweed, and midwife a new sort of glean from out the lashing waters onto my-side, land-side, sand-wide world. Make his cradle in the turn of my hand and lift him to where my neck is a cleft to share dry skin and warm, encircled by wind moans in lullaby. We both are foundlings found in the finding. All that the tides have snatched from us is now repaid in this, a crowning catch-- perfect transfer of seed to the barren, speech to the silent, orphan to his rest. -- Michelle Shelfer and her husband, Jerry, operate a non-profit called Prepare a Room Ministries, which seeks to help those hurt by abortion and disciple the next generation to embrace life and the Giver of life. Her poetry has been published in Ekstasis, Penwood Review and Solid Food Press. Her poetic themes often centre around motherhood. She can be found at michelleshelfer.substack.com/ and on social media at @preparearoom. The evening breeze through the window,
As I look back into the low Tree dancing to the silent play Of clouds and moon, and hue of gray; Pale blackness on the deep'ning sky, Its shades of dark made beautiful By lack of light, absence of ray, When silence ends a Maker’s day-- Empty'ng beauty. Bending echo Of weathered creation outgrows The night. Then, a low distant cry Striates hist'ry. Lost in time full Laces of blue displayed his rule, While the trees sing its Lullaby. -- Yannick Imbert teaches theology in southern France at Faculté Jean Calvin. He is a Tolkien scholar and publishes books and articles at the intersection of theology and culture. He has also published online in Transpositions, Ekstasis, Macrina, Inklings Studies and other theological journals. He writes in French at delagracedansencrier.com. What a waste to be hiding,
didn’t we think? So I gave you my sight line and the quiver behind, shedding several old skins in the course of my tears. You rowed down that river, the heart of my darkness, and tethered your soul to the floodplain spine. You were a part of my yesterday, my tomorrow too, and this moment, I’m hoping, in the wounds broken open, the courage you planted finally took. And I’ll grow into love because of you. -- For K.P. and R.H. Aisling Cruz is a Midwest-based poet and artist. Her work has appeared in Gotham Literature, Agape Review and Oyster River Pages, among others. In my soul is a gate
I cross every morning, Mindful of the great Bright dawn daily rising. I cross every morning, The threshold of my soul – Bright dawn daily rising Of His constant presence. The threshold of my soul – Ambiguous border Of His constant presence – Receptacle of Grace. Ambiguous border: In my soul is a gate, Receptacle of grace. In my soul is a gate. -- Yannick Imbert teaches theology in southern France at Faculté Jean Calvin. He is a Tolkien scholar and publishes books and articles at the intersection of theology and culture. He has also published online in Transpositions, Ekstasis, Macrina, Inklings Studies and other theological journals. He writes in French at delagracedansencrier.com. after artist Michael Healy
Can I hold your image as the panes of glass? There the golden sunrise nudges up the field, rosy luminescence bleeds out from a flower. The blueness of water skips on the rock that once carved a valley from the spotted hills. Every place you walk in whinnies with light, though I often do not notice this. Sometimes I spend hours wanting to be noticed, just to find myself curled over your shoulder, covered in dust and merino spirals. You tell me I have been here for years. -- Aisling Cruz is a Midwest-based poet and artist. Her work has appeared in Gotham Literature, Agape Review and Oyster River Pages, among others. I’m not good with plants
But I found this seed, if you can help. There are some cracks, Exposure has caused it to suffer. The soil doesn’t look good: Dry and inhospitable. Are you surrounding it with manure? Is that the right thing to do? The plant looks sick. Ashen leaves with brittle branches. Do we need to resoil? Replant? Will fresh water be enough to save it? Can you take this seed, this dream, in my heart – That time and heartache have beaten down, And make it something more? Will you breathe new life into this and cause something to grow? -- Kris Green lives in Florida with his beautiful wife and two savage children. He’s been published over 60 times in the last few years by the wonderful people at Nifty Lit, The Haberdasher: Peddlers of Literary Art, In Parentheses Magazine, Route 7 Review, BarBar Magazine and many more. He won the 2023 Barbe Best Short Story and Reader’s Choice Award for his short story, 'Redemption'. Currently, he has regular nonfiction articles being published by Solid Food Press on fatherhood entitled 'On Raising Savages'. ‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…’ (Hebrews 12:1)
I walk into the small church, and the first thing I notice is that the walls to my left are covered with icons – of Christ, angels, saints. Hardly an inch of brick shows between each frame. The faces watch me through the dark fog of incense and candlelight as I sit in a chair near the back. I have heard of icons being described as windows into heaven, mirrors reflecting holy light. Is this why they strangely make me feel at home here, even though I have never to my memory encountered anything like this place? It is like a footpath lined with tall, leafy deciduous trees quietly breathing, exuding life, oxygen into the atmosphere. I am surrounded by icons. The priest in bright robes slowly walks out of one of the doors screening the altar area. He is clasping a censer, which looks like a lantern dangling from golden chains, but instead of light, it gives off clouds of smoke every time he shakes it before each person as he drifts to the back of the church. The clanking chains sound like sea waves crashing, and waves of people bow in response, some making the sign of the cross. Now he is curving round back towards the altar. He looks at me and shakes the censer towards me. I feel this is a greeting of some kind, perhaps a blessing. I bow in gratitude. I later learn that Orthodox priests cense both icons and people in this manner to show honour to God. As St. Basil says, ‘The honour paid to the image passes to the prototype.’ Just as when one kisses a photograph of a loved one, they are honouring not the photo but the beloved, so when the priest censes an icon, honour passes through the wood and paint to the saint it depicts. And when the priest censes a person, honour even passes through that person to Christ, the prototype of us all. I am surrounded by icons. Behind my desk in my classroom where I teach, on a cable box running along the wall, sits an icon of various people serving the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner – each one Christ in disguise (see Matt. 25). Every morning, I look at the icon to remind myself that in a mysterious way, each of the students I will teach this day is Christ. In other words, when I teach, I am standing before twenty to thirty living icons. (How I sometimes wish my students were as calm as icons!) Beyond the classroom, whenever I meet someone, I am meeting a living icon, since every person is made in God’s image. (The word ‘icon’ comes from the Greek word eikon, which means ‘image’). My wife, children and wider family. My colleagues, my neighbours, people at church. The commuters I pass on my drive to work. The strangers I meet once whom I may never meet again, at least not in this life. Even my enemies. I don’t usually think of them as living icons. Sometimes I get stuck on someone’s behaviour at a certain moment or their reputation or my prejudices against them. Sometimes I’m preoccupied with my musings that I fail to recognise that before me is a reflection of God that I am called to honour, just as the priest censed me on my first visit to an Orthodox liturgy. As Joe Bisicchia writes, ‘Perhaps we suffer / too much self-admiration to notice… / how bread breaks / in every face’. But such poets help me to notice and remember. KPB Stevens describes how Christ’s light deepens his vision of the people he loves so that their often clunky forms are ‘almost lost’, and ‘they hide within the radiance’. I would push this image even further: perhaps their forms are not lost in the radiance as much as found in it. An iconographer would tell you that each depiction of a holy person uniquely captures their personality through such distinctions. The bald head of St. Paul, for example, or the dismembered and restored hand of St. John of Damascus. Some icons include key objects from a saint’s life, such as, in the case of St. Melangell, a hare. Despite the common features that icons share, such as halos or gold, each one is simultaneously unique and identifiable. The saints’ distinctions are not lost in their holiness but transfigured. In other words, perhaps we are called not to be illusions (meaningless fantasies) or elusions (in which our identities are forever hidden) but allusions, in which we mature distinctly while finding our home in Christ, the fullness of the image of God. So if we are living icons – masterpieces, saints in the making – then how do our lives, including their peculiarities and particularities, offer glimpses into God’s presence? Do I step out of the way enough to let God’s light shine and to notice his image in others? I'd like to think that reading wholesome literature, such as we strive to share on Foreshadow, can help us here, can remind us of who we are called to become, can teach us to honour God’s image in each person. Like a wall of icons, many of the works we have shared this past season have reflected truth and beauty, sometimes in unexpected places, such as in ‘Herald Across the Divide’, ‘Burning Bush’, ‘Pharasaic’, ‘Dust’, ‘Carpet’, ‘St. Luke at Nazareth’ and ‘Vesper Sparrow’. Others have portrayed choices and turns in the lives of ordinary people that reflect the archetypal victory of Christ, such as in ‘The Story of Prisoner 16670’, ‘That Poet’, ‘Like a Land of Dreams’, ‘Doubt’, ‘Waiting for the Word’, ‘Narration’ and ‘Poems to God, No. 139’. May we always be, and remember that we are, surrounded by icons. -- Josh Seligman is the founding editor of Foreshadow. Note: We are now accepting submissions in line with our next theme: ‘Offerings and Open Hands’. At its heart, the theme is about offering ourselves to God in trust that in so doing, he will bless and transform us for the life of the world. Also keep your eyes out for a new Foreshadow project called Anaphora, a resource hub for people reflecting on the relationships between teaching, faith and literature. On a rainy morning last May, my wife and I viewed acres of contemporary art housed in two Biennale campuses in the Castello district of Venice, Italy. We encountered varying degrees of talent and vision — paintings, sculpture, installations, video — carried off with varying degrees of success. After an hour, with so much artwork to take in, my sensorium, as usual, began to frazzle, and the impulse to keep moving kicked in — a drive-by treatment that left me with a lingering sense of regret.
In the afternoon, as the sun broke through to light the towers and cupolas and green canals of the beautiful, sinking city, I suggested we ditch the crowds and take the vaporetto for the quick trip to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and its eponymous Baroque church designed by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). The Benedictine church’s white marble façade and iconic belltower beckoned across the blue water. “There’s supposed to be an art installation there,” I added. “A sort of satellite to the official Biennale.” We entered the basilica without great expectations: we’d ingested a full diet of art in the morning, and I’m no lover of the baroque. Once inside, though, as I looked around, my footsteps slowed. Here, in the marbled brightness of a sacred space, several figures made of wax — archangels, I would learn — stood tall, mysterious and challenging as standing stones in a forest clearing. The few other visitors, I noticed, communicated in hushed whispers. And the words I’d never forgotten from the pen of French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, philosopher and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), words that penetrated me like a spear four decades earlier, returned: “the power of the Word Incarnate penetrates matter itself; it goes down into the deepest depths of the lower forces.” The artist, Berlinde De Bruyckere, was born in Ghent, Belgium in 1964. She grew up with a different angle on life: her father was a butcher. The title of her installation, “City of Refuge III,” is the third in a series based on the Nick Cave song of the same name, a song with roots reaching back through Blind Willie Johnson to folk and blues: You better run, you better run/You better run to the City of Refuge. The humanlike archangels stood on their own pedestals, messengers from God reflecting our uneasy souls, their faces concealed by wax cloths. They were unbalanced, as if preparing to rise. Maybe. The works of Teilhard reached me at a crisis point, professionally and personally, when my life resembled an intransitive verb in search of an object. I was in my mid-30s, that vulnerable age Dante wrote of when he became lost in a dark wood “half-way along the road we have to go.” I read Teilhard’s bracing prose with the enthusiasm of a parched wanderer lost in the desert encountering a fresh-water spring. In describing his own dilemma, the priest and scientist put his finger on the modern one: “he will give up any attempt to make sense of his situation; he will never belong wholly to God, nor ever wholly to things; incomplete in his own eyes, and insincere in the eyes of his fellows, he will gradually acquiesce in a double life. I am speaking, it should not be forgotten, from experience.” In his vision of the universe, Teilhard established Christ as the Omega point of cosmic evolution. Whatever we do, in a Christ-centered cosmos, he wrote, it is through the care we bring to the tasks by which we earn our daily bread and, as responsible citizens, care for the least of those among us, that we create and build, and are in turn further created. Such is the “divinization of our activities,” Teilhard observed. “Christ is the goad that urges creatures along the road of effort, of elevation, of development.” De Bruyckere’s archangels are not so explicit; they are poignant in their ambiguity. But their very presence confronts us with the eternal question: how shall we live? In the sacred space of San Giorgio Maggiore, a sanctuary and refuge through the centuries, in a wounded, post-Covid time, the artist has asked the question with pity and tenderness. In the sacristy, De Bruyckere placed wax tree trunks on metal welding tables — a post-apocalyptic vision that nevertheless suggested possibilities of regrowth and redemption. It was a grim, psychological landscape, the broken trees seemingly splayed at random, unless one catches, however fleetingly, an image of order in the universe, like the washed-up driftwood we sometimes come across on the beach arranged in interesting, complex patterns. The installation was juxtaposed with an altar painting by Giuseppe Porta (also known as Giuseppe Salviati) (1520–1575), which shows Mary and Joseph presenting their infant child at the temple in Jerusalem. Two angels hover above the scene, one holding a cross foreshadowing the crucifixion. And resurrection. Other installations appear in the corridors of the gallery halls — wounded body parts of wax, wax casts of animal skins piled, more or less neatly, on bronze pallets, and tree branches, but the heart of the exhibit, for me, was found in the figure of a recumbent archangel on a pedestal resembling a coffin made from old building materials. Do we behold a corpse, an angel guarding an unseen body, or a slow chrysalis-like progress through a dark passage toward the light? Teilhard again: “that the perceptible enters vitally into the most spiritual zones of our souls — then we must also recognize that in the whole process which from the first to last activates and directs the elements of the universe, everything forms a single whole. And we begin to see more distinctly the great sun of Christ…rising over our interior world.” De Bruyckere’s “City of Refuge III,” installed in a very old church on an island away from the madding crowds of Venice, confronted us with a series of blunt potentialities: torpor or emergence; life as a warren of cul-de-sacs or a collaborative work of creation; to tread water or plumb the deep-down labyrinths to arrive, once again, at the overwhelming question: how shall we live? “For staying is nowhere,” Rilke famously wrote in his First Elegy. -- Mike Dillon lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. A former publisher of community newspapers, his poems and essays have been published in this country and internationally, including Dappled Things, Rain Taxi, Kyoto Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Galway Review and many other venues. His new and selected poems, Nocturne, was published in October 2024. It is sometimes a radiant world,
this life in Christ. But only sometimes. Sometimes I am shy, afraid to name the body, to describe the strangers whom I love. The little nun who was never a nun, in her house of dusty corners, who worked in hospitals for years, with her smile and white curls, who studied and wrote songs and was never beautiful, but strangely weightless in a reappearing way, like sunlight, high and vaporous, within a winter day. Or the eternal neighbor who walks within herself, never selfish for news of others, yet always going to the doctor with some friend who’s lost his sight or is becoming distanced from his mind and slowly slipping away. She went to boarding schools and cleaned summer cabins, one arm withered by polio, although you’d never know it unless you chose to notice. She offers salvation in a neighborly way. Or the man with infants’ hands, so soft and unscarred that they might have just come from the womb, who talks, often, of cold moons and a creek-bordered farm where his ancestors labored and died, too soon. If I were to make a mosaic on the wall it would have to hold them all, each figure made of glass set in stone, each tesserae catching light and holding it, obscuring my perceptions and showing that they’re limited. When light shows brightly the forms are almost lost, the lines of colored glass embossed beyond simple distinctions, and I, and those I love, hide within the radiance. -- KPB Stevens is an Episcopal priest, poet and painter who lives in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Cardinal Sins, Squalorly, Inwood Indiana, Orion Headless and The Christian Century, as well as two EASE Gallery chapbooks, Wildernesses: Physical & Spiritual and Trespasses. His story 'My Beam of Light' was selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2014. |
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