The Arts Contents

After the Chemski Ridge Fire

by Jeremiah Loverich, O.P.

For my days are vanishing like smoke,
My bones burn away like a fire.
The bread I eat is ashes.¹

Black corpses of trees
Poke out of the defiled earth.
Withered hands
Clutching at the last breath of smoke
Or hunched toward the incinerated soil
     like scythes.

Even the wind is burned away:
This is the dead land.
This is the naked land,
Enshrouded by its own cremated remains

What god demands such a sacrifice?
For whom was this offering of scrub oak and sagebrush?
     This incense of juniper and pine?
For whose atonement this holocaust?

When Mesha, King of the Moabites, immolated his firstborn son
     to Chemosh on a pyre atop the city wall,
The Israelites fled in fear,²
Intoxicated by the destruction they were
Capable of bringing upon themselves.

Here, charred branches
Murmur elegies to lost leaves.
Here, blackened stones
Moan a dirge to a forest perverted by fire.

Ring around the taper,
Pocket full of paper,
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Sit in sackcloth.
Smear soot on the faces of your children.
When the spasm of the inevitable is realized,
Questions drip from mortal lips,
Like ash from the end of a cigarette.
Mouths made of cinders
Implore the concrete sky.
Charcoal eyes,
Sentenced to the eternal ephemeral,
Cling to the ravished horizon,
Toward which the heaving sun
     is sinking like a tranquilized elephant.

________________

¹ Psalm 102

² 2 Kings 4:26-27

Bodega Bay Trilogy
 

by Jeremiah Loverich, O.P.

i. The 18th of October

The fog rolls in, slow and wet.
It obscures the hills
     and the road carved around their feet
     with its tired houses clinging to cliffs.

They squint through smeared windows at the sea.
Sea and sky blend into a gray
     which roars louder than the waves.

These feeble liberties
     that emerge when the horizon is lost
     deceive me with whispering ambitions.
In the soft western mist
     where the sun disappeared
     memories glimmer with unfamished passion.
They ply me with supple confusion,
     and slowly grow dark.


ii. for Maureen

Flies swarm around the beached, bloated
     lengths of kelp.
The wind is salty as skin.
The sun pale and cold.
A gray gull cries and dives.

I taste mortality in a glance over my shoulder:
My footprints are already consumed,
The rotting kelp reeks of regret,
And I still miss you.


iii. After the storm

In other places
     the sea beats against the land
where the things of man
          slowly crumble and collapse.
Steps, sea walls, foundations,
     now form a colossal wreck—
sunken, skewed chunks of concrete
          slick with algae.
Rusted rebar protrudes from broken ends
     like pipe cleaners.

Dark birds with eyes bright as embers
     peck at the succulents clinging to the battered rocks
          jutting from the shore.
They endure the blows of the waves
     with the dignity of martyrs.

From somewhere above,
     where the houses are teetering above the sand and stones,
water is trickling,
          seeping out of a crack in one of the ancient steps.

Untitled Sonnet

by Andy Younan

Yet You have made him little less than God,
This fleshy vehicle for sin and thought;
For mind and lust. Now vicious (he would nod
To sleep in minutes in that Heaven bought
For him in Blood) and now a saint portrayed,
And still his value known by increment:
In sinfulness, at least in likeness made;
In saintliness, at most an instrument.
In neither way his value undermined:
No matter scope of sin, he cannot drag
His dignity beneath his noble mind,
But yet if good, unable still to brag.
In any case, the lion and the lamb;
In any case, the seed of Abraham.

Sin speaks; the sinner hears it in his heart.
He fears not God in faith, but in his mind
He knows his Guilt – a shout, at least in part
Or corner of his ear; but Sin, in kind
Begins to scream. In Chaos, then, the sound
Of Guilt is lost – but then again, with Care,
Is heard again, and sinful man is found
In two worlds: one of Chaos, one Despair.
Then deafness, soon, and silence come upon
The sinner – hardly living, hardly man.
A prayer made is spoken, and is gone:
“Come save me, Lord Redeemer, if you can.”
I hear You not. I beg: speak louder, Lord,
And let me be attentive to Your Word.
 

Untitled

by Andrew Younan
 

“O the mind, mind has mountains…”
               - G. M. Hopkins

But where the mountains? There
there is no depth or height,
and flesh is left and right:
is real, is high and low.
How far to reach, from mind
to mountain! No, not far:
no ‘far’ or ‘near’ here, where
there is no ‘here’ or ‘there.’
But where then, meet the mind
and world? In parallel,
with one above and one below?
No. No ‘above’ and no ‘below.’
In me they meet – the mind
and world. But what am I?

Labor Day 2003,
Bodega Bay
 

New Shema

by Dismas Sayre, O.P.

God

is one

He alone

Simplicity

in Trinity

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