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The Lord often reveals Himself through nature. The magnificent appearance and delicate color of an early January 2007 moon
stimulated this poem. The terrain overshadowing an east Tennessee rural highway cradled the moon.
Midnight Mass is now published in the Faith & Inspiration section of the December 2008 issue of the American Diversity Report,
an online magazine based in Chattanooga, TN.
Midnight
Mass
Sun sets
behind sculpted land
in silhouette
against sheer veil of night
dyed shades
of Pacific blue.
Eucharistic
moon, nearly full
reflects
soft platinum yellow,
is raised
above chaliced hills.
Trees bare,
bow in secret shadows
of altared
rock, wind chants
chimes of
quaking aspen.
And nighthawks
fold their wings.
Aftershocks, an Easter poem, is the "Top Story" in the Faith & Inspiration section of the April 2009 issue of the
American Diversity Report.
Aftershocks
She wraps him snug in linen
scented with frankincense and myrrh.
Lays him in the limestone trough
where the oxen and the asses share straw.
~~~
His naked body
lowered from crossbeams of locust and oak—
coarse, stained where iron spikes
had driven bone and flesh into the wood.
The angry sky rips open,
the temple veil tears,
spilling all its stars upon the ground.
~~~
His body lays on sand, sifted, and spread
on the cold stone slab. Strips of linen
poured with aloes and myrrh
wrap him as if to mummify.
Sealed in darkness
The bright morning star pierces veil
of night heralding dawn sashed in purple;
morning mist lingers over the karst caves—
hewn as if sarcophagi for kings.
The stillness stopped by tremors, as once
before on Golgotha. Now the sound
shears the air—stone gritting stone
rolling in its track, no longer to mollify
the darkness, but to rent it. In the tomb,
the marble slab now pallored in shadows
shows the linen outline of the absent corpse
in the aftershock.
You can read along the Biblical narrative poem while listening to a me recite "Whispers" to a backdrop of music. (The
recording was made using the free sound recording application called Audacity and exported as an Ogg Vorbis to compress the
file, you may need the 800-Kb codex to play the sound recording. Both the application and codex are linked below.)
Whispers, voice recording with music (1.7 MB OGG file)
Codex download for .ogg extension
Audacity 1.2.6 link to free download
Whispers
Running
frantic,
sweat-salted
fear
falling
downslope
off
his forehead
He
climbs craggy rock,
shagged
pieces of shale
clap
under his sandals
slipping
his way to refuge—an overhanging cleft
Enemy
still felt pressing
Muscles
ache to a burn
Lungs
gasp
Death
whispers
resignation
Elijah
lies down
on
slab of gravestone grey
Rock
pillow hardens dreams
haunted
by whispers
of
vengeance for her priests—
four
hundred corpses
Legacy
of his courage
fades
with forgotten bravery,
adrenalin
replacing it
with
another born of fear
The
morning shone
through
opening of cave
A
raven, sun-silhouetted, stood
by
the tablestone—
round
of bread, cup of water
prepared
in irony before his enemy
From
the stillness, wind stirs the juniper,
its
scent, incense; its meaning,
whispered
A simple nature poem doesn't raise much attention among quality print journal editors. There must more than simply describing
nature with poetic words. The poem below (also presented with a delightful image on a short Powerpoint) is richly
symbolic and appropriate for the National Day of Prayer. I often use an epigraph to orient the reader in poems that are deeply
symbolic and metaphorical.
National Day of Prayer Poem: Incense (62 KB PPT)
(In case you don't have PowerPoint, you may download a free viewer from the site linked below.)
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2003 (1.9 MB)
Incense
And when he
had taken the scroll, the four living creatures
and four
and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb,
having every
one of them harps, and golden bowls full of incense,
which are
the prayers of saints.
--Revelations
5:8
The persimmon sun
shone through its smooth light skin
hanging from some celestial tree.
Before the ripened fruit fell
behind the orchard hill
it gave sweet honeysuckle
to the asters and the hyacinths.
Cinnamon mingles scents of lavender
lingering with the sage.
Yet the flowers fold their petals
they pray through the evening dark
and in the morning, the jonquils and the lilies
stretch their long stems toward the rising sun
and dry their tears of dew.
My Christian poems appear in the anthology, A Knoxville Christmas 2008 (ed. Cyn Mobley, Bushido Press). The sequence was written from 2005 through 2007 and rich in imagery. The poetry spans Mary's
miraculous conception, Christ's birth, and the visitation of the Magi when Christ was a toddler:
December Dust of White
The Announcement
Christmas Skies
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On my Adventures in Astronomy website, I feature some light-hearted poetry--probably more astronomy than poetry. Nevertheless,
I did receive a remarkable inspiration before I learned what a well-crafted poem is, I recommend you visit my site and read,
My Sol (and its footnote) and listen for the nearly two dozen Scriptural references that I learned about after
I had written it!
While there, you might be interested to read the feature article when I was interviewed for a prestigeous
amateur astronomy publication of the Astronomy League, The Reflector, "The Inspirational
and Stellar Poetry of John Mannone," ed. Kent Marts, March 2005, pp. 12-14. (You can download the small PDF file there.)
Adventures in Astronomy/Radio Poetry page
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