by Evan Rhoades
Author’s Introduction
The poems in this collection explore everything from the natural world and history to faith, death, and spirituality. They are grouped roughly by their themes, and if I have written poetry that “tells the truth, but tells it slant” as Emily Dickinson would say, then each participates in an apprehension of the sublime, the cathartic, the beautiful, the true, the good, and the enchanting—engaging with something that we seek, even if we did not know it before turning the page. If you, dear reader, leave one poem with a deeper understanding of some unexpressed piece of yourself… if you find a feeling akin to a growing warmth in a space you had not realized was cool or a much-needed release of something you did not know you were holding onto, or perhaps, even, a sense of kinship with the words on the page—a sense that something was said that you had thought many times before but could never put into words—then it is truly poetry that you have read.
Salvatore Quasimodo sets a lofty standard for this type of creative expression: “Poetry... is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”
If poetry can bring this experience about, if it can enchant the soul in a thoroughly disenchanted age, then it serves as its own reward. My hope, therefore, is that these poems would bring your deepest dreams, feelings, and questions into the light, that we might explore and marvel at them together, and, perhaps, rediscover a piece of that enchantment that has been lost.
Storied Silence
Two grandparents gone
Two getting older.
A call from two grandsons
Phone pressed longingly against aged ear.
Grandma is no longer young.
She cannot hear as she once could.
Calling louder into the void
I find in return
The sighs and signs
Of an aging life.
Grandpa speaks more to cats than to friends
Though he can paralyze a deer
With a single bb pellet
And cry softly at his mistake
His aim to startle, not to harm—
His shot added to the list
Of memories best
Left forgotten.
How selfish to act
As if they will outlast me
Simply because they have come this far
Outrunning the hounds of time.
How cowardly when,
Like Schrӧdinger
I dare not release
The dreaded future.
As if I could, at any moment
Find in the familiar dial tone
A weeping silence.
I refuse to open the box
For fear of what may lie inside—
Grandpa’s cats alone
Crying for food or friend.
Grandma’s soot-stained floorboards
Never again to hear her requests
For a repeated phrase—
A repeated life.
“You must picture me alone in that room, night after night, feeling the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. At last I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” —C. S. Lewis
Strange Waters
The waters seemed cold
Unwilling to look back at me
As I stared down death.
The sea raged with violent passion
Seeking to dissuade me
But my course was set.
The thunder tore sky asunder.
The air was charged with the storm—
Charged to rend my courage in two.
Neither my will nor my body could stand the pressure
Nor my soul, for I would surely die.
Was this truly the way to life?
There, below the masthead
There, along a plank made from a dead tree
I pledged my soul.
And when a dreadful baptism
Prepared me for eternity
It was under the deep blue waters
That I finally went out to see.
Omnipresence, Omnipotence, and Omniscience
A trinity of power
In, through, outside of all things
Yet personally present in every moment.
You shape this world with Your being
Yet I cannot find, cannot touch—
You, imbuing reality with existence itself.
From time immemorial to futures unknowable
Angels rejoice when we turn to You.
But do You not ordain from the foundation of Creation?
Power unstoppable, will unbreakable
You allow creation to deny Your divinity
All for love?
To some it seems a jest, the irony of it all
But how can You laugh
When nothing is unexpected?
How can the Creator,
Girded in splendid glories
Be steeped in humility?
Humble in knowledge
Using wisdom
To aid the foolish.
Humble in power
Through generous restraint
Your Love contending with judgment.
Even in creation
You refuse to reveal yourself—
Hiding in plain sight.
Why is it so rarely mentioned, the humility of my God?
Perhaps because, like any who are truly humble,
You have no need to boast, and instead, bless.
Commend Your God to Us
Fire spreads over barren bush
Igniting wood with wonder.
Flame reveals to him who looks
Creation naming its creator.
Son of Adam, come and see—
Come find what can be found.
Listen to this burning bush
That lies on holy ground.
You are sent to build and break
The strongest dynasties
A mirror for His will to wake
And part the sullen seas.
When, like Ozymandias,
Your legacy lies in dust
Let the plaque on which you rest
Commend your God to us.
For then, on that same holy ground,
Where first your soul was framed
Shall you enter into that fount
Where clouds of witnesses proclaim
I am! I am!
And no other name.
Pax Romana
Roman peace they called it,
Though two words had never been
So unlawfully wed.
May they call the cut of the throat
And deathly silence
peace?
The subjugation of nation upon nation
Complete with Panem et Circenses
The baking of blood in the sands with the baking of bricks in the sun
Creating the arch, the aqueduct, the resilient roadway.
The deadly spilling of life-blood in sport
Brought decadent streams of water to house and home
And the realization that man is most mortal
When bellies are full, hearts held hostage by desire.
Into this wasteland came a man
Who offered not to feed the flesh
But to sustain the spirit with living waters
And the body with His blood.
His message carried on the roadways
Built as if made for His nail-torn hands
By the blood of the least of these—
Crossing to faith in the face of fear.
The terrified cries of men upon the battlefield
No louder than slaves heaping stone upon stone;
Their lifeblood as precious as any warrior’s,
Spilled down the drains they wrought.
For these, the eternal wellspring came.
His word spread as that same blood,
A sea rushing over a barren desert
For they were a thirsty people.
Some for Death, whose cross He hung from
Some for Life, which He gave to the deserted,
Though they first deserted Him.
The Roman peace they called this age
But not for Rome or Reason's sake
Nor because borders failed to break,
For break they did in battle.
A war waged on fronts unseen
Where angelic swords gleamed
And demonic hordes convened
To treat with death till its defeat.
At battle's end, the Word did spread
That God and man will justly wed
Already—not yet—Pax Christi at last—
And until then, our souls recast.
You, Conquerer
You, conquerer, crossed the Atlantic.
Your ships cut the waves.
Thinking yourselves like Peter
You reached out, lacking faith.
Like Jacob, you hunted a blessing
For some desired Destiny.
“Manifest”—you claimed to have captured it
Seeking white gold in dark fields.
Your homestead rose
From pools of blood—
Primordial arrowheads
Broke upon your dead steel.
My Natives you slew
My Africans you enslaved;
My Virtues you extolled
While you dug the Graves.
It is written:
Whatever you do
For the least of these
You do for me.
O Father, forgive them
For they know not what they do.
Sojourners
I reach across the current
Of airwaves, like an invisible dance—
Calling for my familiar partner
Over sea-wide expanse.
Nothing reaches back.
No hands clasp mine.
No eyes glow an inviting amber
In the natural noonday sun.
Only her shadow lies before me.
The screen never bright enough
To bring her beauty
Beyond its dim, rectangular cell.
When did we exchange electric touch
For energy found in coiled wires
And trade wives
For WiFi waves?
We fling wide our hopes
Cast through the ether-net
Only to find those we love
Equally as pixelated
As our poetry.
Wishing we could see beyond our limited world
We have become pocket-pilgrims
Journeying to shrines
Made by other’s lives.
Only to find
That no one ever lived
Who lived vicariously
Through mirrored faces.
Canopy
Under a canopy of stars
Lies a little town
That nature has known
Far longer than I.
The colors seem vibrant here
Enriched by the land, the air,
The mountains that tower
Over distant houses.
A fitting meeting place
For brothers to gather
And drink of Diana’s bounty:
A world not our own.
We look to the stars
And see another land
That we cannot reach
But cling to nonetheless.
We look to the trees
And thank them for strengthening our houses;
For suffusing our sun-bathed souls
With visions of golden-green Cyprus.
We peer into the night
Which shines upon the stars—
An ever-present backdrop
To the cosmic dance.
Arms ‘round one another
We welcome the mystery
Of young days turning
Long nights burning
With the passion of fellowship
And the heat of words
That none shall know
Save our jocund company.
Lamplight pierces the darkness
As we descend from our lunar throne
Memories drifting on the wind behind
Songs sailing along the roads ahead.
* * *
I wake to the temptation
Of leaves whispering my name.
Thrown aloft by autumn wind
They beckon me to join them.
My companions lounge with me
As I lay down in a hammock of blue
Gazing up languidly at the clouds
That skid across an azure sky.
My journey home is of no consequence—
My cares but a passing concern—
And for the first time in many moons
I feel the coaxing pull of peace
Upon my restless soul.
A brief stay here has confirmed to my heart
That under this canopy
I could lay down worries and fears
That have rested long upon my shoulders.
Yes, I could call this place home—
But not because of nature’s spell.
Rather, because of the men I’ve met here
Who make it so.
Nature’s Lover
When beside the noonday sun,
You’re overcome with white-winged hope
Lovely whispered longings come
As grass stirs atop the slope.
Look you not behind.
The wind, like sea-soft soap—
And simple psalms you soon shall find.
When you sing o’er Nature’s din
Then spring forth, O soul confined!
Quick comes a maiden answering
Flower-fair with pool-blue eyes
To sing with you atop the rise.
Then, where sun and flame comprise
Most precious melodies
Surely she shall claim the skies
And offer you the breeze.
Weeping Willow
The weeping willow sighs
Her hanging branches
Lightly shading
The forest floor.
Sun shines through her gaps;
Golden rifts in her emerald wall
Pulsing, glowing, gleaming
Around ribbons of green.
Her leaves and branches flow in the wind
Moving to some invisible current
As if the earth were a riverbed
And she swaying seaweed.
Her solemn, enchanting figure
Swirls about in eddies and storms
Each leaf—choices once made—
Clothing her in a tumult of jade.
But winter freezes her greenery
Shattering her jade into razor-shards—
Regrets that, falling, tear at her roots
Despair drowning her in drifts of snow.
So, she seeks the summertime
When leaves surround her,
Pressing in on all sides,
Hiding her face from the sun.
Content to bloom alone
Behind her mournful vale
She entices her leaves to grow
Keeping her from daylight’s gale.
Probing light aims to pierce
Her self-erected fortress
To reveal her barren bark
Kept hidden for an age.
And in such times of deadly solitude
When branches refuse the gentlest touch
Then does the Gardener enter in
To caress the saddened, dying bush.
With care and comfort, he reaches out
And prunes back the impenetrable leaves
He opens up her emerald wall
And breaks through her illusory sheen.
For when the sun shines clear that morn
And Willow looks, expecting scorn—
The pain and sorrow and hurt she’ll see
Will be left—fluttering harmlessly—in the breeze.
The Muse
She may be found in the shadows
Of a sundial, turned just so—
Light reflecting off morning dew
Bearing her whispers back to you.
Perhaps her likeness may be formed
By stirring embers in wood-born fire
Seas of grass waving in western winds
Still forests, beckoning with slow-turning petals.
Her voice, all sweet-tongued nectar
Trails a bold black
Upon the page of time
Where pen and quill bespeak divine.
Her legacy formed by the words
Of those who have known her
For a brief time, between stanzas
Only to lose her
At the turning of the page.
Nothing known of her is certain
Save that she comes and goes as she will
Leaving tender hearts behind
Shattered by attempts to pursue.
But some, beaten and bent into fullest form
By the journey to her shores
Find what it is they tirelessly sought
And give back to man a message:
“She is only for those
With the will to bend
And the courage to break
Upon Destiny’s tide.”
Destiny
Leaves fall
On cool ground
Chasing winds
Long gone now.
Steps trod.
Lives cross
Fallen scarlet
Open spaces.
A leaf is stuck
Carried about
On a man's tread.
Both unaware
Of their destination.