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Poetry

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Throwing Up in the DC Temple

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Maybe it was envy  that churned inside meas I looked around the room. Wonderingwhat healthy Mormons felt  instead of fear.   My body forced  everyone  to consider  what it meant to be sick in…

Passion

“And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?”—1 Nephi 11:16 A body so light, it floatedacross wind-whipped wavesand did not sink. So full of life,it survived empty forty days,no wheat for forty…

Fierce Passage

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Today while researching ancestors, sifting through nested petalsof records for names that belong to me, peoplewho’ve left their bloody signatures in my genes, I found Melissa, some sixth…

A Good Sick Girl Never Gives Up

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. A good sick girl would never give up.She pushes on in search of a cure,working as if all depended on her.“Not knowing beforehand” what she should do,she moves…

Hippocrates

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. The doctor calls her sweetheart when she criesat hearing there is nothing he can find.He pats her back but will not meet her eyes. He doesn’t really mean…

Migraine Suite

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Prelude Something is not right.      A haunting quaver to the world. Your mind  feels viscous, your body      watery. The lights have dimmed. The sense      of the smell  of ozone. AllemandeA greasy fingerprint on…

Thanksgiving in Kindergarten: Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996

We grew up in a city named for water we could not drink.Our ancestors walked for miles to finda home that would not burn so easily,then stumbled on salt, which meant preservation. In 1996 we…

Mormon Tea

I.They leftDenmark’s ripening wheat fields,crossed moss-covered pathsof England and Wales, forsookthe saturated airof Tennessee to build homeson ground glazed in the open-air kilnof the western sun.Called by God,they did not think to askfirst peoples for…

Collect for a Family Friend Killed in a Sabbath Morning House Fire

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. O, preening angels, voyeursof bright and burning things, of underbuilding flare-ups andflaming caved-in tinder, whose breathing—plumed, infernal,unforgiving—sweltered her last daybreak with unholy invocation—Please, if mercy be,…

Earthen Lavers Tyler Chadwick, Litany with WingsScott Hales, Hemingway in Paradiseand Other Mormon PoemsElizabeth Pinborough, The Brain’s Lectionary:Psalms and Observations

A few years ago, William Logan wrote, “Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience.”[1] We could more accurately call it a major art with many minor audiences grouped, like the poets,…

All Content

flicker

with gratitude to Adam S. Miller and Ryan W. Quinn in the beginning, Godgave grace awayfast and free to all this is what we call creationwhich was actually continuationand still continues every day, every hour,…

Noted in the Dark

Some nights here there’ve been singings      the children out into twilight . . . their countings,their hidings, their      ally ally oxen frees.And sometimes the crickets were not sounding bereft      but offered impressions you needed to hear. Now in…

These Are the Hours

when birds disappear taking strips of light      folded in feathersnight insects ready themselves      for meals from leaves of rose and raspberrythe hollow by the lane      pools with evening like waterno moonrise cool radiance      but night…

Vantage: Hoback Rim to Wind River

Closed to drift most of the year,trails descend through short lives of wildflowersbright in colonies, August air verging on frost,its thin metallic edge:snow squalls visible aheadwhere a continent divides.Life stays steep. Nothing in the view…

The Days Between—After Leaving Our YoungestAt College

It’s turning fall in this long alley of young trees,poplar leaves still and golding in deep shade.You see no one and hear not even birds. But the pale trunks together seem to humlike choir rows,…

Lithium Shuffle

Down the streettrusties from the state hospitalfollowing the horizon of their noon shadows,their feet scooping up the sidewalk,the fastest as slow as the slowest.The sun is on them and pitiless.If we, shaded neighborson the other…

heavy seeds

. . . they buried the weapons of war, for peace. Alma 24:19 bury seeds these      with covenant gritshrill songs on our lips      as we circle the pit clank seeds clanging      as we cry-file bybeg,…

Homemade Medicine

Grandpa filled gelcaps with his own mixof dried herbs. Before clean food,before expensive organics, beforewellness became photogenic,he was a health nut. I asked himwhy did he grind dried leavesthe color of new hay,why did he…

Heart Sutra (In the guest bedroom at dawn, after the pandemic)

1Today we scorn Russians,But we were invaders, too.Our lifestyle at stake in Iraq.Searching but not finding.Blood and bones and dirt.Infection and tears.Fighting to prove . . . what?Truth? America? God on our side? Twenty years ago, I heard…

No Man Can Serve Two Masters

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. But my diagnosis says otherwise.  Depression oozes under my door:  the destroying angel visits:until I can’t get out of bed.  One week later I’m waving bloody hyssop  like glow sticks at a ravenudging sushi…

Throwing Up in the DC Temple

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Maybe it was envy  that churned inside meas I looked around the room. Wonderingwhat healthy Mormons felt  instead of fear.   My body forced  everyone  to consider  what it meant to be sick in…

Passion

“And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?”—1 Nephi 11:16 A body so light, it floatedacross wind-whipped wavesand did not sink. So full of life,it survived empty forty days,no wheat for forty…

Fierce Passage

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Today while researching ancestors, sifting through nested petalsof records for names that belong to me, peoplewho’ve left their bloody signatures in my genes, I found Melissa, some sixth…

A Good Sick Girl Never Gives Up

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. A good sick girl would never give up.She pushes on in search of a cure,working as if all depended on her.“Not knowing beforehand” what she should do,she moves…

Hippocrates

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. The doctor calls her sweetheart when she criesat hearing there is nothing he can find.He pats her back but will not meet her eyes. He doesn’t really mean…

Migraine Suite

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Prelude Something is not right.      A haunting quaver to the world. Your mind  feels viscous, your body      watery. The lights have dimmed. The sense      of the smell  of ozone. AllemandeA greasy fingerprint on…

Thanksgiving in Kindergarten: Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996

We grew up in a city named for water we could not drink.Our ancestors walked for miles to finda home that would not burn so easily,then stumbled on salt, which meant preservation. In 1996 we…

Mormon Tea

I.They leftDenmark’s ripening wheat fields,crossed moss-covered pathsof England and Wales, forsookthe saturated airof Tennessee to build homeson ground glazed in the open-air kilnof the western sun.Called by God,they did not think to askfirst peoples for…

Collect for a Family Friend Killed in a Sabbath Morning House Fire

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. O, preening angels, voyeursof bright and burning things, of underbuilding flare-ups andflaming caved-in tinder, whose breathing—plumed, infernal,unforgiving—sweltered her last daybreak with unholy invocation—Please, if mercy be,…

Earthen Lavers Tyler Chadwick, Litany with WingsScott Hales, Hemingway in Paradiseand Other Mormon PoemsElizabeth Pinborough, The Brain’s Lectionary:Psalms and Observations

A few years ago, William Logan wrote, “Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience.”[1] We could more accurately call it a major art with many minor audiences grouped, like the poets,…

My Body in the Temple

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Halfway through the session, I become awareof a full bladder and nothing else.All that is holy is eclipsedby flesh. I pant in claustrophobiabetween the lady who…

Like a Prayer—Phormium tenax

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. How that late sabbath afternoon you sat cross-legged on their lawn, Elder S at your side, the couple just across, their backs to her late summer…

anamnesis: confronting God in the flesh

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. 1. a patient’s accountof medical history,a reiteration of conditionscontracted by mortality,a form of proud flesh’sgranulation over a wound,a raised tissue massdelineating impact to sayhere is pain,…

Osmond Ward Chapel, Now Demolished

Sometimes from the thresholdof these doorswe are greeted by another self,another worldwe wish to worship, incarnationthe tithe we offerfor such a crossing: we, seeking the divine,the divine leaning toward us,fading coal of memory igniting into…

Portrait of Agnes

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Stern little lady,ancestor in an oval frame,I like the way your shoulders slopeand your fingers dangleover the book and the carpetbag skirt.I like the way your…

Cemetery Walk

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. It was somewhere around here, I think.Where they buried that baby,yeah, the one I told you about.No, not by the pioneer obelisksa wife for each sidefresh…

The Garden I Know

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. In his artistic agony,diamond drops of bloodcovered Christ’s chiseled body,sacred sweat shimmeredin the light of the Passover moon.The Son of God, an altarpiece,in serene pain and…

Third Place: Penitent Magdalene, Donatello

Shock of agingin a wooden sculpture—more than yearsdisplayed here,her gauntand weathered faceportraying time had its way—sunken eyes,broken teeth,parched and haggard lips. The cathedralof her handsforms a gothic archbelow her chinsuggesting prayer,her frail body embracedby heavy…

First Place: His Own Hand

I desire to be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.—Theologica Germanica i. What the Right Hand Is Take my right hand—the index finger crookedfrom a long-forgotten break; the dintwhere…

Second Place: Our Lady of Innumerable Appellatives

Listen to the Out Loud version of the poem here. Enter into Her gates with thanksgivingand into Her courts with praise.—Psalm 100:4 1.Swirl of gold gleaming in our daughters’ eyes.Amen. Whorl of cirrostratus haloingthe moon.…

Saint George, Utah

Listen to the audio version here. Not named for the Saintwho met the princess bythe lake and with her girdleleashed the dragon. Who killed it for the people’s conversion.Whose chapel in Windsorholds a part of…

Bear One Another’s Burdens

Getting there

Paper Route

Podcast version of this piece. Sabbath afternoon in summer sometimes feelslike those February mornings I’d wedge thedamp butt of each newspaper in friend’s saddlepack clouded gray with his indistinguishablefingerprints. Their buckling mouths a smudgedbouquet of…

From the Angels’ Perch at Mount Moriah

Podcast version of this piece. Scene: Thicket for a Slaughter We have seenbets, contests— only the greatones sent tospar with God: father, son,sacrifice. Scene: An Examination Question:the brain, a tangledbramble—the fire and the knife,a fearsomebinding.…

Recreating Abraham’s Star Charts

Podcast version of this piece. I pause on the path, drop my sticks,and bend to read them like runes.Tell the stars, They said. So I do daily— I chart their breathless turning asI gather berries…

Addendum to Jacob Sorensen’s Patriarchal Blessing

Podcast version of this piece. I don’t know, Jake,why Dad asked me to drive you there,but I did hear every word Brother Allen said,and here’s a few he skipped: Our Heavenly Fatheris pleased with your…

Ministry of angles

Podcast version of this piece. You who more than oncespelled angle when meaning angel,are now one—maybe both.A sharp line on white paperdriving hardand fastin another spacewhose numbersI do not know. YetIn the arithmeticof our individual…

Morning Light

Podcast version of this piece. That dark matter that fashioned us, days laterMade light by command, what voice, I wonderCould shake atoms into place and stir invisibleWaves through the air, as something we cannot seeAllows…

Tender Rills

Podcast version of this piece. If Gods are poeming Kolob,if I am poeming God, if we arepoems to each other, A word is more than a destinationthan a path, than a map. A word is…

Prism

Podcast version of this piece. They had agreedthat if she were seenthe boy wouldn’t be believedin seeing them.Nevertheless, she was there,her iridescent spherea coronaover their column of sun,reflecting,refractingthe morning.The flowers turned to her,the green of…

God the Mother Speaks of Salt

Podcast version of this piece. I baptized you before you were born. After, rubbed you clean.I’ll cleanse all your wounds in season. You’ve forgottenhow to savor my holy. If you seek,you’ll find these veins run…

God the Mother Speaks of Xenia

Podcast version of this piece. I AM the children sleeping under mylar in a Texas warehouse.I AM the fathers lifting toddlers to their shoulders on our journeyto safety and rest. I’m safety and rest. But…

Benediction

Podcast version of this piece. Here’s the truth: My faith remainstepid. Lukewarm as summer rain. Spew-worthy. A compass in fragments, I saved pieces: base plate, arrow, needle.Reassembly is beyond me. Millennia ago, I stood on…

Book of Life, for Timothy Liu

Podcast version of this piece. If there is a literal bookon a plinth of filigreed gold, and an angelstanding as sentinel at heaven’s needle-eye entrance, who’s not to sayour names appear etchedon its pages, un-erasable.…

God the Mother Speaks of Hearts

Podcast version of this piece. won’t you agree with me the heart’s a glorious organ moon jelly  a ghost heart throbbing in oceanlily bulb  an earth heart humming undergroundbear  a furred heart curled up in cave’s dark I’m…

Mothersong

Podcast version of this piece. Let us amass our wandering kicks, wondering in awe at thesecostumes her womb hath made. O Motherof the sacred hearts, sing your peasant lullabies before our every sleep. Ring like…

creation story

Podcast version of this piece. He makes the light and the primeval oceans and the rapturous Word, but I have the dirt the ground the chthonic underbelly and sustenance of all. I have the jewel-toned…

Big Bang, with Sternutation and Seer Stones

Podcast version of this piece. i. In the beginning, Mother worked yleminto a loose sphere. A swirl of stray particles, stirred by the breeze blown through herstudio window, circled her workbench, tickled her nose. She…

Ascension, after John Donne

Podcast version of this piece. Embrace the first and forever night,Heartening as this Moon journeys from crestingTo full-figured, and in this ecstasy begins to fallEarthward, pulling me down to orchards heavyAnd underground, into mysteries of…

Acoustic

Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…

Hymn to a Maple

Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…

Salt Lake City, 1957

Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…

Color

Podcast version of this piece. Morning at homelistening to silenceand a solo cello,caressing old books,fog outside,fire inside. Treesin crystal veils,fog-doused sun,Earth’s palette replacedby soot and chalk. No color.Only grays,darker or lighter.No real black.No clean white.…

Book of Mormon Poetry James Goldberg, A Book of Lamentations

A few years ago I was researching poems written about the Book of Mormon. I had read Eliza R. Snow’s “The Lamanite” (adapted from a poem she wrote before becoming a Latter-day Saint titled “The…

Young Gods

Slipping off a Sunday dress—hoping you’ll join me and undress.No more dark slacks and white shirts,corruption of innocence tends to hurt.It’s worship too irreverent for pews,forgive my transgression against a holy muse,but, trust me, crisis…

Casual Violence in Sunday School

John the Baptist was a hairy scorpionwho skittered out from the wildernessand began stinging folksuntil they saw the Holy Ghost. He molted like all prophets do,lived in caves, under rocks,until the predators found him—took his…

The Leper

An armadillo dug up the grassin my parents’ yard last year— the kind that bounce buckshotoff their back and carry leprosy. If only I could do the same:materialize armor, lumber along. I could curl up…

Bi-Bestiary

I suppose only the animals that paired offand shuffled up the rampsurvived the flood. So this Bishop, pointing outthat we would rather flirtthan marry—well, he built an Ark out of the treeslining the church property.He…

Daffodils

Your lips are melting petals,Wilting into my mouth.My tears not clearEnough to revive them. When you learn to fly,Will they forget to dance?Lose their maypole eyelashesAnd languish, lonely, withWings cut. And yet,I pray, make me…

Created in His Image

I.The first lie they told me wasBlonde Jesus. Thick Belinda locks,And blue ocean eyes.He hangs on the cross, whiteLike a tender lamb, orWhite like a lily flower,Or like white snowSmothering brown ground. II.The second lie…

“I Cannot Describe Salt”: Elizabeth Willis, Poets in Exile, and the Church Invisible in the Age of Pandemic

Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato’s Republic with a flippant “if . . . poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her,”[1] Western poets…

Review: Poetry as Ceremony Tacey M. Atsitty, Rain Scald

O Holy People, show me how I am human,how I am soon to sliver. Stay please, for womanor man’s sake. Succor me from a telestial state,where I long to be self-luminous in a slateof granite.…

Candy Dish Sonnet

Already the heart-shaped dish on my end tablelies combed bare: long strips dug out============== a cleaning out============== a scratch in grain, table scraps lain out so comely, meaning to loveor hold cacao or almonds—those striaeof…

Lacing

VII. Sometimes I kneel down to play a gamefrom my childhood. Only then can I feelgrains of gravel, each pebble digs in so real.Sometimes I act as though I am the same,a young girl, rope…

Review: Dayna Patterson, If Mother Braids a Waterfall

Review: Dayna Patterson, Titania in Yellow

Review: Sunni Brown Wilkinson, The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

Review: Michael Lavers, After Earth

Review: Kate Piersanti, Life in Poetry

Review: Jan G. Otterstrom F., Move On

Review: Colin B. Douglas, Into the Sun: Poems Revised, Rearranged, and New

Review: R. A. Christmas, Leaves of Sass

Parousia

She says she was eating or opening a window or just walkingdully along, and always had been, but tonight there might befew angels. These things. Our dogwagging across the foreground, the porchthat still needs fixing…

Matriarchal Blessing

Your hands were on my head first. No formal ceremony. I was an infantand shouting clouds trundled and thundered,atmospheric pressure strangled my stubborn ears refusing airflow.The blue chair in the living room rocked,my cries received…

Grasshoppers in the Jar of the World

The jar is silent because it is full of praise.The grasshoppers are loud because they, too,are full of praise, clicking as they fly. The grasshoppers jump, but the jar is too high.They try to climb,…

Praying on Gravel

Not yet March, already weedsbring me to my kneeswith trowel and bare fingers. Under the loblollythe hellebore are in bloom,a periwinkle or two. The weeds are in the white gravelof the walk. My son has…

Until You Come

Taipei, ’97. I walk past side-streetvendors selling lychee nuts and blackrice cakes, to an acre of bare dirt,concrete pylons lifting a cloverleaf.A grizzled man by a beat-up Buickthrows gobbets of meat from the trunkto a…

James Goldberg and Ardis Parshall, Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic

His Twelve Points of the Scout Law (Grandpa Fesses Up)

Sunni Brown Wilkinson. The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

“To speak to Moses, God / put a stone in his mouth, put on / a sackcloth of verbs (want, need), / cleared his throat. Cried out” (3). Sunni Brown Wilkinson this way begins her collection The…

Karen Anderson’s Excavation of Ghosts Karin Anderson. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

Mark 5:9—“My name is Legion: for we are many”—opens Karin Anderson’s masterwork Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Anderson lyrically pools her ancestral narrative in sweeping loops, eddying history, religion, and landscape. Ghosts speak elusive,…

Becky, Not God

set the hour for their reunion.She’s under the greencanopy in the closed coffin. She signed away her body,except for her skin,so her hip bones might be recycled into screws to repair broken anklesor wedges to…

The Stars Saw God

I found God huddled in my father’s insanity.There beneath the layersof confusion—as to why none of us saw thespinning ball or the parade outside—I saw his vacant expression shine out likeGod-rays through the clouds.Clarity in…

Daryl Prays, The Snake River, and Insomnia

Daryl Prays How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! Lamentations 4:1 At fourteen, Daryl cut across an empty lotbehind a brick pharmacywhere he had picked up his mom’s pills(linden…

Genesis Chiasmus

In the Big Ending,My son used to sayWhen I read him the Genesis board book.Which was perfect, I thought.Such a start must surely have followedAn ending that was big.What brought that ending on? And whatGave…

Born Again

Because I did not fit a second timein the womb of my mother,I was born of my father instead. He held my arm to haul me from the waterand with the other, squared it to…

Women’s Blessing

Issue of Blood

Explaining God the Mother to My Father

Self Portrait in Which I Fail to Hide My Daddy Issues From Google

Willing the Storm

On Women and Priesthood Power

Mother’s Blessing

Reason Stares

A Found Poem

The “Blackblue Heartguts” of Trees Brooke Larson. Pleasing Tree.

Third Watch

Vernal

Dry Tree

True Religion

The Agreement

The Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse

Advent: Moose in Moonlight

Creek Skating

Bridegroom

Jesus Christ

New & Everlasting

Sweater

The Moldau in a Utah Living Room

The Mormon Peace Gathering

Sunday School

Judas

Devotion

Prodigal Daughter

What Ashmae Taught Me

Circles and Lines

January 21, 2019

Our Lady of the Temple

Prayers for the Altars

Friday Morning Shift

Skin of Garments

My New Temples

Then and Now

Limen

Ritual

Placenta

Dream Psalm

Walking Back to the ‘70s

Talitha koum

On Cherubim and a Flaming Sword by J. Kirk Richards

Review: It’s Lonely at the Top Ryan Shoemaker. Beyond the Lights.

Review: Mother, May We? Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Edited by Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido.

The Older Covenant

The Tree at the Center

One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days

The Pioneer Woman, St. George

Self-Portrait of Mormon Middle Child as Isabella

After the Curtain Falls, Isabella Speaks in Achromatics

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Raking

the fog

Soft

A Better Country

Poema de Halloween, 2001

Alpha

Sonnet—For Solstice

Agency of all that matters

Choose Your Own Belief: Of Sharks, Art, & God

Forgotten Birds

Domestiku

The Goodness of Created Things

If Joseph Smith Had Been Born in California

As If Nothing Matters

Faith

At Least

Trevor at the Fountain

Grand Canyon, North Rim

Ajalon Moon

The Holy Ghost in Polyhymnia’s Closet

The Holy Ghost in Melpomene’s Closet

Echo of Boy

Nosebleed (A Mormon Pilgrimage)

Christus

The Grammar of Quench

Not the Truman Show

Solomon the Wise

Averted Vision

Elegy / Prayer

True Ideas

My Sadness

The Skin of the Story

The Flock

Words

Eight Visions of the First

Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 151–155
Shiffler-Olsen turns Joseph Smtih’s first-person First Vision accounts into poetry.

Temple

Keeping Faith

October Above Trial Lake

Stony Places

My Sister Once Died

Grief

The Trail

The world was divided into three.  Three shards of sagebrush and sky.  That’s how it looked to Emma as she blinked through the thick wooden wagon spokes next to her head. She winced at the…

Baptism

Ordinary and Profane Poems

Tropical Butterfly House

Kill the Poets

Prophet by the Sea

One late afternoon just before sunset, the Prophet with white hair like the mane of a lion was walking by the sea with his friend, Fernando. They walked and talked about many things as the…

Mormon Conversions

From Utah Poems: To Elias

I brought my daughters to your grave
There in the river’s bend 
Not far from where, their age, 
I watched you dedicate the monument
To Jim Bridger: trapper, river-searcher. 

You lay deep in Utah’s summer
So still they couldn’t imagine 
This was their grandfather, 
Yourself a monument now 
To probing dry country.

Boy Diving Through Moss

A boy with joy and fear inside
stood on the plank
above the pond.
He sensed the cold, dark water
underneath,
and, daring,

Mental Gas

Charles to his teacher—Sir, you say
That nature’s laws admit decay—
That changes never cease ; 
And yet you say, no void or space ;
‘Tis only change of shape or place—
No loss, and no increase. 

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen

Dr. Clinton F. Larson has been acclaimed as a Mormon poet, even as the first Mormon poet. In his review of The Lord of Experience Professor John B. Harris seems to have represented many of…

The Poetic Mystique | Marily McMeen Miller Brown, The Grandmother Tree, and Vernice Wineera Pere, Mahanga: Pacific Poems

Beyond the sentience and the craft, under the sound and shape and color of the poem, one seeks the mystique that synthesizes and sets forth a poet’s real reality. Marilyn McMeen Miller  Brown’s book of…

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

The sensibility described by Amy Lowell—that there is something odd about women who write serious poetry—is still given substance today by the endangered state of the species. Even I will not waste time counting the few woman poets anthologized before Lowell’s time; contemporary statistics suffice.

Persephone

The trees are making white 
buds. Shrunken heads, 
last year’s berries, hang 
on leafing branches. I do not

Hold

Gray day with a brown leaf refusing 
at the end of a wind to drop, 
why is the crabbed clinging 
so intricate a part of the dance? 

Repapering the Kitchen

We probe and scrape and peel away the faded 
Multicolored layers of a lifetime, 
Like Schliemann 
(Who ? Grandmother asks) 

Gratitude

As I kneel to 
needlepoint nice words 
in quiet 
careful 

Memory’s Duty

Like an irresistible green vegetation 
easing over everything in time, 
a sense of comfort crept over my mother, 
weaving into her slowly tendrils of death. 

Bronzed Cadences

I hear faded trumpet sounds of summer 
and fill my arms with sleepy wildflowers, 
hold them close, feel the damp, 
smell the last fragrance. 

The Golden Chain

Paradise pendant from a golden chain 
opal pendant paradise 
swirling blue and green 
through white cloud streaks: 
golden chain gleaming on the breast of God. 

“Moonbeams From a Larger Lunacy”: Poetry in the Reorganization

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 22–31
This study addresses poetry within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and defines an RLDS poet as someone who belongs to the RLDS church and who has published poetry in some form or other.

The New Mormon Poetry | Lewis Home, The seventh day

A new Mormon poetry is beginning to emerge from the shadow of traditional, more bardic Mormon verse. Peeping about in the bright sun, blinking a bit and rubbing its eyes, it shows itself in poems…

Still Sounds of Winter

Waking from my loud dream 
I hear only what is here: 
the cornered stars rattling in glass 
and the slow roll of a drumhead moon. 

Charm for a Sick Child

we will dream now of a cave 
with a figure at the entrance, 
see the magic seeds she holds 

Another Birth

They dream of going hack. 
            The bars on their beds 
            are fingers before a face. 
Their knees rise up toward chins 

Fishers

In the last days of summer 
we walk through tall grass 
to the river 
long before the sun spills 

Expatriate

The Hawaiians are surprised that we also had beaches. 
            In their minds we represent one vast igloo 
            Filled with people anxious to escape 
            To winter in Hawaii. 

Born Again

As you enter the water unsinning, 
I shall repent eight years 
Of watching in the dark and loving 
Without turning on the light. 

Oil upon Oil

Like the sound of laying the warp, whispered names 
resonate within the grained, muraled, marble 
and curtain walls of this holy place, and veil 
the light and air with your form, hands 

How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering

The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…

Unfinished Sestina for the Secretary of Defense

We were inside the world. 
The children were sleeping. 
Light fell through the window. 
One of us wore red. 

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

Returning

Mouth over the reed, 
you empty your feelings 
into the hollow heart. 
These are the pieces left: 

Diaries

I keep diaries in my head 
At night I write on sealed pages 
In dream codes a         sort 
Of dot-dot-dash Morse himself 

David and Bathsheba

When I slid the damask 
from its plastic sleeve 
to spread it on the table, 
the stain throbbed against crisp white. 

Fathering

When I first hold our children, 
Lately having labored alongside you, 
I promised many things — too many — 
Like the alcoholic too late repentant, 

The Interview

Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…

Benediction

Ardmoore told Carmen Stavely, who’d been away in Idaho visiting family, that what happened that Sunday morning was absolutely confidential. The bishop had instructed all who’d been present to keep the matter strictly to themselves;…

Lightning Barbs

I’d ridden this way a hundred times, 
Up Monday Town along the fence 
Dividing wheat from perennial sage 
Herding cattle to summer grazing 

One Year

The scene was written 
In advance, 
Rehearsed as often 
As the days of waiting 
Would allow. 

As Winter Comes On

Beyond my chrysanthemums and barbed fence, 
aproned sisters, some in hair nets like cafeteria cooks, 
whisk their casseroles to the kitchen of the old wardhouse. 

This Is My Body

A deacon offers the broken bread. 
Aware of awkward wait as bishop 
Receives the bread of ritual first, 
I take it up, thoughtless of blessing, 

All My Silent Midnight Hours

Things just get worse.
Which heavenly linoleum stripe
Leads to universal Emergency?
The resident angel could scour my soul.

Grains of Life: Fragments of a Sonnet Cycle

If I could give to you a dew-wrapped day, 
You have no need to tell me — I should know 
That you would use it all to make things grow. 
The furling bud, the fruiting branch are pay 

Sonnet for Spring

there’s honeysuckle in the exhaust, a fine green 
beard between walks, spring softens us 
again, now we confess the earth is a drum 
encased in living skin, not concrete, 

For the Bishop’s Wife

Some of us stood together 
on your star-gray lawn, 
sang you Christmas carols 
in the warm California air. 

Grandmother Envisions Her Own Death

A white pillar will glow from the sand as I die. 
Those backyard trees will shake their empty pods 
against the sky. My moldy body will sink 
into its bed, smothered by sinners. 

Winter Burial

Grey clouds, March-heavy hung over 
an old and mottled snow that day 
we brought him there to you. 

Seasoning

That fine white burst of bush blossom 
Has come again. Blast 
ing through the winter crust 
And scattering the afterbirth of spring, 

Nativity

The eyes of the beasts shine into my own. 
The archangel’s hair is on fire. I stumble 
through the mudprints of cows and ewes 
toward the damp side of the cave 

They Have Closed the Church My Father Helped Build

where he sawed through his finger 
now perpetually stiff, 
paid three assessments 

Evenings: His Church Calling

The sound burrs in my head 
like a racket of angry birds 
swirling from the sky. 
He’s gone again; 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Cancun Beach, Mexico

What kind of God has made this sapphire tide 
stroking the white sand mouth of Yucatan, 
outrageously extravagant, a place 
fit for the baptism of God or kings 

Sons

New grain, you are comely; 
Long, straight, supremely vernal. 
Standing in Earth’s sun 
Unashamed green, 
You sway. 

Recollections from an Ex

mused in several voices 
to the tune of tinkling cymbals 

It wasn’t like she didn’t blend right in. 
In fact, based on the type of clothes she wore, 
People always figured she was from Salt Lake. 
Her skirts were long enough, that’s for sure.

For Brother de Mik

Cupped in your papery palm the rose 
was like a wound, flowering. 
Your wife nodded when we brought it. 
Yes, Papa, yes is pretty. Then 
she put it in a bowl to float 
and wilt on water. 

Lulu: On the Death of a Sister

Gone 
from the pampas. 
The only brunette; 
her first airplane flight at six months. 

Discouragement

                  Discouragement, 
is the adversary’s vision of the work 
revealed to and 

Stones; The Salutation; The Problem; Grandmother, Grandmother, Grandmother; Bishop

Feliz Navidad

No room at the inn, 
For them, anyway. 
It didn’t take ESP to read the situation. 
Just avoiding unpleasantness later. 
He had enough on his mind just then. 

Our Way

we were young 
and war was our way 
we’d fight in class 
or after school 

Luggage

You are required to keep the poundage low: 
two large cases and a carry-on: 
what you take for months overseas. 
In a year of famine, you have volunteered 

Pruned

I have always been a flowering vine, 
Seeking new trellises to trail on, 
Climbing ladders to the sky, 
Lusting over neighbor fences 

To Watch a Daughter Die

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Prayer of a Novice Rebel

Don’t try to drop little nuggets. 
Please, Sir, I mean. 
Or give me too much of a sign. 
I don’t want a sign now— 

Bodies

Weight — 
heavy weighting down 
of airier stuff 
in birth 

A Life Well-Shared | Margaret Rampton Munk, So Far: Poems

In the Fall of 1985 DIALOGUE published Meg Munk’s suite of poems entitled, “One Year.” In a mature voice and through particular images, she dramatized her battle with cancer. In the spring of 1986, this…

Winton Night Walks

At night along the canals 
Dad was best. 
Beside narrow dusty tractor roads 
Slow dark waters, 

August 6

“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!” 
I went, thanking for the first time the crook 
In my spine that stopped me buck naked 
From buck privacy, and took me back to you 

To a Modern Isaac

I’m no Abraham. 
I’ve bowed to a few idols in my day — 
Just somewhat unintentioned. 
Sacrificing children to idols 

Navel

I drive by a red farmhouse 
in the setting sun. Orange morning 
darts through rippled glass. 
High-glossed linoleum 

The Oldest Son Leaves for Nagoya

Surprisingly tall, he looks down toward 
His six-inch shorter father 
And shifts his feet, anxious 
For the moment of departure, awkward in uncertainty

Burial Service

The place they put him seemed extravagant — 
Sprawling flowers, hovering crowd, artificial grass 
To cover up plain dirt. 
The coffin shone, wood lustrous as the new organ 

For Bonnie

Ever since the homestead days, when you, 
The eldest, baked the bread for barefoot boys 
Flushed from the corn for lunch, the care we knew 
Was testimony of your oaken poise. 

Here’s the Church

While the organist pumped 
“Let Us All Press on in the Work of the Lord,” 
and the chorister napped her arms 
like a whooping crane, and some sat there 

Failed Friendship

Sisters nod and smile, 
inclining intimately toward her in the crowded room. 
Years of testimonies shared and friendships deified 
linger in the worn cushions and heavy curtains. 
She brushes jostling shoulders, turns and feels 

Lesser Voices

Sun-circled history 
Paints famous fools 
But leaves plain brown men 
Unremarked 

sonnet on life’s dangers

cop and father, he cautioned us of more 
than boogeymen and fire, in case of snakes, 
freeze where you are, same for skunks and por-
cupines, brave enough to tromp on cracks, 

The Lord’s Table

The banquet table was spread, 
But I could no longer smell 
Satisfaction in the room. 

Two Fishermen in Hong Kong

We couldn’t find anyone 
in that inner-city maze. 
Between thick buildings 

Three Poems for My Mother

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Early Through Winter

Someone went shooting rabbits last night 
blasting any flesh too slow to dodge. 

I track the powdered ground until I toe 
a scarlet gash melted to concrete.

Pure Thin Bones

José Luís was sick. That was why Michelle and Renata stopped by to see him on their way home from missionary zone meeting. They walked with Nielsen, his companion, who had gone to the meeting…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Grandpa

you talk of breakaway stallions 
with hooves poised to strike teeth, 
years on long lean roads past Las Vegas 
selling church pews down the valley. 

Passion Poems | Emma Lou Thayne, How Much for the Earth?

One might suspect that a book of poems published by Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms Race might possess as interesting a history as the poems that comprise it. How Much for the Earth? by…

A Lot to Like: Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems edited by Eugene England and Dennis Clark

One of the Women

The Slow Way Home

Deity

Daddy Hung Me Out

The Blood in My Veins

If I Had Children

I Can Wait For

Heartbreak Hill

The Next Weird Sister Builds a Dog Run

Transformation

Call Before the Obituary

Island Spring

Innocence

I Consider Jonah’s Whale

Burn Ward

Sisters

Being Baptized for the Dead, 1974

In the Back Lot at Hillview Manor

Baptism: As Light as Snow

One Sunday’s Rain (After Word of My Father’s Illness)

The Dark Gray Morning

Cure

The Virgin Mary Confronts Mary and Magdala

How Could We Have Known

The Perseids

Mechanics

The Hero Woman

Patchwork

Losing Lucy

Nickel Girls

Over Coffee, 600 B.C.

Song of the Old/Oldsongs: Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women edited by Leatrice Lifshitz

Ovum

The Good Life

Jackrabbits

Waiting

A Vision of Judas

Two Sisters Visit Dieppe

Celebrations: Things Happen: Poems of Survival by Emma Lou Thayne

When I Swam for the Utah Valley Dolphins

The Mistake of the Psycholinguists

Art and Half a Cake

My Mormon Grandmother

Coney Island Hymn: Shore

The 20/20 Leap

Ecclesiastical Check

Woman Bathing ; Authority

Hands

Missionary Court

Late

Relativity

Return

Manna in the Desert

Variation on a Love Letter

The Book Handed Her

Winter Fast Offerings

Entire Unto Himself

The Pulpit

Yellow Hair

Sestina for the Coming Fall

Saint Theresa and the Lepress

What El Salvador Meant to a Three-year-old

Beth-lehem

Night Myths

Notes for a Son, 19, Living Abroad

Snowy Night

Becoming a Writer

Breadcrumbs

Exercising the Priesthood

Postcard

Litany

Household of Faith

God With Us

A Body That Expands

Double Exposure

Sacrament Prayer

Brando

Warren Travels With His Father

Decoration Day

Day Dreams

Sole Makers

The Man Without Sin

Lancashire Saint Dies

Leave of Absence

Resurrection

Our Fecundity

For My Father, 1934-1990

Mama and Daddy Standin’ By

In Passing To Her Fathers

Bean Counting

I Have Learned 5 Things

Aspens

Magi

Commentary

Ireland

To Joseph of Nazareth: Patron Saint of Fathers Dispossessed

Hobby Horses

Movements Giving Off Light

Mummy Pendulum

Sariah

Jesus is Coming

Marcus

Secrets under the Surface: Crazy for Living: Poems by Linda Sillitoe

The Invisible Woman

Going Dark

Serving the Papers

His Sermon

Nestling

For the Girl Who Saw Her Mother Cold

A Courtship

On X-ing

My Mama’s Hands

Storytime

Early Winter

Clean

In a Far Land

Pilgrimage

Basilica

Bathing a Child

The Violent Woman

Naked

Cap Meets the Prophet Brigham

1844

Snows

The Time Traveler Comes to Cana

March Children

Negative Space

Razor Sharp

1948

The Three Boats

Weight

Hospital Healing

Sleeping on Wood

RELEASE: A Moment

The Freeway

How Things Look from the Other Side of the Lake

Cereal Polygamy

Brides of the Afternoon

Slant Sonnet for Melissa

Ghost Month

Reply to: “You Are a Spiritual Person”

Toni’s Song

Because Last Night Was Friday Night

Saturday: One Version (Fourth Week of an Unidentified Illness)

The Prophet’s Dream

What Remains

Aristocrats

His Faith-Promoting Story

Bread: A Returning

The Statue of Brigham Young at South Temple and Main, Salt Lake City

I Will

Hemmed In

A Killing Frost

George

Descending Order

Untitled

Fall Weekend at Rehoboth Beach

In a Far Land

They Eat Dogs in China

Gaining Darkness

American Christians Visit Mt. Nebo

The Miro Exhibit at MoMA: Dec. 21, 1993

Pieta

She’iina Yazhi

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

By Extension

August

The Greening

Origami Birds

Properties of Water

Seconds Coming

Awake to the Ineffable: Some Would Call It Kundalini

To Sleep with the Ineffable: Inviting My Sweet Informants

The Soon-to-hibernate Bear Addresses His Public

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

Dialogue 29.4 (Winter 1996): 119–135
The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

Leaving

Black Moroni

Life-line

Silver Footprints

Alaska Girlhood

We Dress for Armageddon

Kick and Muff

Shorn

Passing On, Holiday

Fire in the Water

Oasis

Desert Bloom

Stake Mission

Kayenta

Moon Phases: Childhood

Mountain Turn-out: Week After My Father’s Funeral

Father Sky/Mother Earth

How She Comes

Fall is the Wrong Analogy

Martyrs

On the Death by Cancer of Someone Too Young

Woodwork

Take These Depositions

Straw

Birthday Dreaming

“Watercress Grows Best in Running Water”

Lily Foot

Templum: A Place Thought of as Holy

After a Late Night, Waiting

Out of the Night: Childness

Sacrament Hymn

From the Land of Nod

Holy Sonnet for Mother’s Day

History

A Prayer Addressed to Lord of Death

Mormontage

Allelujah

Long Distance

At Fifty-Five

Alder and Maple in Molting

Creations: Mississippi

Multiply and Replenish

Sesquicentennial Pioneer Commemoration Speech

Soft Sculpture

Basic Training

She and He: Alternatives

Lectures on Death at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

On the Fringe — The Singles’ Ward (The Appeal of the Foyer)

Widow’s Weeds

Thistle Field

Straight Up

Miguel

One Method of Hope

Lucifer’s Obit.

Begotten of the Ash

Joseph Loved His Women

To a Cymbidium Orchid

Fashion Show

Ordinary Light

Fact of my Life

We Write What We Want to Know

My Father Comes to Me

To a College Friend Killed by a Drunk Driver

Drama Queen

Night Fires

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

A Name and a Blessing

Luke 7:37

Courting

If the Din of Cities Makes the Moon

Dragging Fanny

Afterward

Above the Estuary

Metaphysics Over Lunch

Caught Gull, Plowing

Companionship

Clay

The First Christmas Eve at Home

Practicing at Sunrise

Natural Symmetry

Night Thunder at the Cabin

Military Funeral in a High Hills Cemetery

Day Music

Wild Things

Plain and Simple

Temple Square — Past and Present

Reclamation

Grandma Comes for Me

Thin Ice

Fertility

Naked

Hop Hornbeam

From Under Ground

Planting Day

Trajectory at the End of Winter

Russell

Jesus Lost

Through a Glass Darkly

Under the Faultline

The Basic Tune of the Sparrow

The Charity of Silence

This is the story of my father’s demise. It wanders when I tell it, and I never know when to bring in the polygamy, so I just do and let matters take care of themselves.…

The By-pass

If I looked up the road from the irrigation ditch, I could see the church house bumping stiff and dark against the sunset’s blaze. “The old church house/’ people called it now. “The old churchhouse,”…

Salt Lake Citations

A friend writes: In a walking excursion last fall through the old block lying between Fifth and Sixth East, Seventh and Eight South—in a narrow alley behind Charon’s Mexican Bakery—I came across a shop of…

Thin Ice

Emma’s Anguish

Joseph to Emma

Winter Dies

Indian Summer

Pah Tempe

Parched

In Riverdale

In a Pueblo Indian Dwelling, Four-Corners

Anhedonia

Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of article as a courtesy. Please note that there may be unintentional differences from the printed version. For citational and biographical purposes, please use the printed version…

Learning to Disappear

Sensing Spirits

An Act of Faith

Maps of Time

Commonplace Nightmares

History of the Church — Part One

Coming Home

Love is a Delicate Chain

Being World

About My Conversion: Directions to a Nonbeliever

Forever Family

Plenty

Spiritualizing the Organic

In the Kitchen on a Saturday Morning

Lament for My Eyes in a Mirror

The Handing

Proud Flesh

The Rose Jar

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

Encounter

Balsamic Vinegar

Wedding Vows

Without Question

Eve’s Psalm

Aspiration

Sestina of the Martyrdom

On a Morning After New Snow and a Winter of Healing Inside

The Passing Lane

Miracle of Wood

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

Syllabus

Remuneration

Water Will

Trouble in Eternity

Nobody’s Grandpa

The Empty Cistern

Disrobed

I Add Craig to My Prayers

Gardner’s Song

Red’s Tire Barn Titans

Archaeopteryx

Night Light

Childhood Homes

Vicarious

Liahona

Christian Spinning

Listening to the Lord

Breach Birth: Aug. 20, 1891

Utah Territory, 1893

Delineation

Alive in Mormon Poetry

Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture

The Woman of Christlike Love

Almost Pentecostal

A Motherless House

The Middle Path, Colorized

We Were Not Consulted

The Right Place

Night Work Near Escalante

You Owe Me

Antler People v. Womb People

Contralto

The Mothers’ Antlers

Inheritance

Nothing We Needed to Know

Cargoes II

War Bride

The Cedars of Lebanon

Aladdin’s Lamp, March 4, 2003 on the eve of first strike in Iraq

Movement: Out of Doors, Out of Town, In Dangerous Times

Gene, My Eternal Brother

Blind Tears

Heart Mountain

Resurrection

Yahrzeit

The Meadow

Eve’s Offering

Afield

Death to the Death of Poetry!: The Art is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

Nov 1, 2001

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999

The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North

The Fall of My Fiftieth Year

Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

Reading into Dusk

Ambulance Unit

The Banality of Evil

Prayer for a Grandchild

Baptism

El Cordero de Dios

A Spinster Physician Weeps While Speaking Her Sermon on Abstinence: A Sonnet without Rhyme

Triptych-History of the Church

Martin in Me

Confession

Thousand Springs

Sorrow and Song

Women in a Time Warp: Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, Edited by Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe

Salad for Two

The Good Shepherd

The Peach

Family Tree

Faith Healing

Churchgoers

The Orchid Grower

Triple A’s

The Elect

Scriptum Est

My Brother’s Bed

My Brother Was Buried Wearing a Red Jacket

Brooklyn: City of Churches

Old Rodeo Man

Carol Took the Call

Everlasting

Bliss

The Holding Room

Guest Room

Sheep Ranch Near Hillspring

On Reading a Blank Page

Jonah in the Belly

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

Washing Mother

Tonkas

Fruit

Orisons

Mouths

Summer Dam

Upon the Face of the Water

Reflections on Darkness and Light

Where Are the Horses?

Compass

Graduation

poetry on the ‘fridge door

Showshoe Song

Borax

Dining with the Devil: A Long Spoon: Poems by R. A. Christmas

Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony

At the End of the Street Lies the Sky

Sonnet to Japanese Spring

Black Handkerchief

Wedding Flower

After My Brother’s Remission

Some with Shadows

While Planting Hollyhocks

Yorick

The Clearing

I Teach Six-Year-Olds about Jesus in Sunday School

Hunter’s Visitation

Nephews

Patriarchal Blessing

To My Teacher

Moving the Story, with Conviction: On the LDS Church and the Marriage Amendment

Land’s End 1997

The Word

One Tree

Spring Variations on a Theme by Lorenzo Snow

Mechanical Failures

Three-Legged Dog

A Proposal

City of Brotherly Love

Beautiful Black Madonna of Czestochowa

Caught Up

Epithalamium

Fidelity to Objects

Necktie

Grace

The Local Police Report

Jesus Was There

Always with Us

Curious

Change

Man, dust

Multi-level Marketing

Glaucus

One Tree Redux

Pierce the Veil

Salt Lake City Cemetary: Jewish Section

White Rain (forty years since our meeting)

Flying Out

What Rocks Know

Sober Child

Neshutan

A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal

Abba: The Name of God

Etching

On Losing My Cell Phone

Oceanography

Relinquishing

Gentle Dad

Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering

A Perfect World

The Man with One Foot Outside of Hell

Handmaid

Our First Home Has Forgotten Us

Contingency #4: White Out

From Outside the Settlement

Untitled

Sheets

the god of small things

Things Missed

Time Being

In this Version of Autumn

Sisyphus

Ripple Rock

The Leg

Internal Affairs

Blue Glass

Abracadabra

Bum Bam Boom

Flannel Board

Turncoat

Romance

An Apocalypse

Accidental Mystic

Marginalia

Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother

Mother Willow

Winterscape: Prairie

Seasonal Ritual

Easter Sermons

Gaius

Dishes

Intermission Wine

Sex Talk Sunday

Listening to My Parents Through the Ventilator Shaft

Blessing My Son

Vitae

Visible from Here

Dark Energy

Four Passes on Mount Horeb

Good Government in the City

Nazarín

San Diego Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints

The Afternoon Hour

Atlanta to Salt Lake

Revelation

After Her Stroke

Finding Place

Runaway

Mass Transit Madonna

Perplexed by the Revelator’s Heaven

Review: Tyler Chadwick, ed. Fire in the Pasture 21st-Century Mormon Poems

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

“Epithalamion” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fern Hill Revisited

Janie Goodmansen’s Reply

Sixth-Grade Broadway Revue

Inaccuracy

Hobble Creek Almanac

Graphene

A Short Poem about Nearly Everything

In Those Days of My Spirit: A Found Poem

Same-Sex Attraction

Blessed Virgin

This Dock My Home

Fractals

Ghazal

The Feather Pen

Glazier

Offerings

Singing in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy

Puzzled

Emptying Pockets

Beyond (on the Beach)

The Hosanna Shout

Sabbath Baptism

Melancholia

Easter

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

IRRELEVANT—RELEVANT

For Margene

About Half

evidence of things not seen

Jungle Walks

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Shade

Evenings in October

Not Far Off Trail, Late Summer

Crow Games

Haiku for the Cat

Blood Cries

Oblation

Faith

Let Rocks Their Silence Break

Review: When Good is Better than Great: Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt Susan Elizabeth Howe. Salt: Poems

Review: Job: A Useful Reading Michael Austin. Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poems

flicker

with gratitude to Adam S. Miller and Ryan W. Quinn in the beginning, Godgave grace awayfast and free to all this is what we call creationwhich was actually continuationand still continues every day, every hour,…

Noted in the Dark

Some nights here there’ve been singings      the children out into twilight . . . their countings,their hidings, their      ally ally oxen frees.And sometimes the crickets were not sounding bereft      but offered impressions you needed to hear. Now in…

These Are the Hours

when birds disappear taking strips of light      folded in feathersnight insects ready themselves      for meals from leaves of rose and raspberrythe hollow by the lane      pools with evening like waterno moonrise cool radiance      but night…

Vantage: Hoback Rim to Wind River

Closed to drift most of the year,trails descend through short lives of wildflowersbright in colonies, August air verging on frost,its thin metallic edge:snow squalls visible aheadwhere a continent divides.Life stays steep. Nothing in the view…

The Days Between—After Leaving Our YoungestAt College

It’s turning fall in this long alley of young trees,poplar leaves still and golding in deep shade.You see no one and hear not even birds. But the pale trunks together seem to humlike choir rows,…

Lithium Shuffle

Down the streettrusties from the state hospitalfollowing the horizon of their noon shadows,their feet scooping up the sidewalk,the fastest as slow as the slowest.The sun is on them and pitiless.If we, shaded neighborson the other…

heavy seeds

. . . they buried the weapons of war, for peace. Alma 24:19 bury seeds these      with covenant gritshrill songs on our lips      as we circle the pit clank seeds clanging      as we cry-file bybeg,…

Homemade Medicine

Grandpa filled gelcaps with his own mixof dried herbs. Before clean food,before expensive organics, beforewellness became photogenic,he was a health nut. I asked himwhy did he grind dried leavesthe color of new hay,why did he…

Heart Sutra (In the guest bedroom at dawn, after the pandemic)

1Today we scorn Russians,But we were invaders, too.Our lifestyle at stake in Iraq.Searching but not finding.Blood and bones and dirt.Infection and tears.Fighting to prove . . . what?Truth? America? God on our side? Twenty years ago, I heard…

No Man Can Serve Two Masters

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. But my diagnosis says otherwise.  Depression oozes under my door:  the destroying angel visits:until I can’t get out of bed.  One week later I’m waving bloody hyssop  like glow sticks at a ravenudging sushi…

Throwing Up in the DC Temple

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Maybe it was envy  that churned inside meas I looked around the room. Wonderingwhat healthy Mormons felt  instead of fear.   My body forced  everyone  to consider  what it meant to be sick in…

Passion

“And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?”—1 Nephi 11:16 A body so light, it floatedacross wind-whipped wavesand did not sink. So full of life,it survived empty forty days,no wheat for forty…

Fierce Passage

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Today while researching ancestors, sifting through nested petalsof records for names that belong to me, peoplewho’ve left their bloody signatures in my genes, I found Melissa, some sixth…

A Good Sick Girl Never Gives Up

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. A good sick girl would never give up.She pushes on in search of a cure,working as if all depended on her.“Not knowing beforehand” what she should do,she moves…

Hippocrates

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. The doctor calls her sweetheart when she criesat hearing there is nothing he can find.He pats her back but will not meet her eyes. He doesn’t really mean…

Migraine Suite

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Prelude Something is not right.      A haunting quaver to the world. Your mind  feels viscous, your body      watery. The lights have dimmed. The sense      of the smell  of ozone. AllemandeA greasy fingerprint on…

Thanksgiving in Kindergarten: Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996

We grew up in a city named for water we could not drink.Our ancestors walked for miles to finda home that would not burn so easily,then stumbled on salt, which meant preservation. In 1996 we…

Mormon Tea

I.They leftDenmark’s ripening wheat fields,crossed moss-covered pathsof England and Wales, forsookthe saturated airof Tennessee to build homeson ground glazed in the open-air kilnof the western sun.Called by God,they did not think to askfirst peoples for…

Collect for a Family Friend Killed in a Sabbath Morning House Fire

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. O, preening angels, voyeursof bright and burning things, of underbuilding flare-ups andflaming caved-in tinder, whose breathing—plumed, infernal,unforgiving—sweltered her last daybreak with unholy invocation—Please, if mercy be,…

Earthen Lavers Tyler Chadwick, Litany with WingsScott Hales, Hemingway in Paradiseand Other Mormon PoemsElizabeth Pinborough, The Brain’s Lectionary:Psalms and Observations

A few years ago, William Logan wrote, “Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience.”[1] We could more accurately call it a major art with many minor audiences grouped, like the poets,…

My Body in the Temple

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Halfway through the session, I become awareof a full bladder and nothing else.All that is holy is eclipsedby flesh. I pant in claustrophobiabetween the lady who…

Like a Prayer—Phormium tenax

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. How that late sabbath afternoon you sat cross-legged on their lawn, Elder S at your side, the couple just across, their backs to her late summer…

anamnesis: confronting God in the flesh

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. 1. a patient’s accountof medical history,a reiteration of conditionscontracted by mortality,a form of proud flesh’sgranulation over a wound,a raised tissue massdelineating impact to sayhere is pain,…

Osmond Ward Chapel, Now Demolished

Sometimes from the thresholdof these doorswe are greeted by another self,another worldwe wish to worship, incarnationthe tithe we offerfor such a crossing: we, seeking the divine,the divine leaning toward us,fading coal of memory igniting into…

Portrait of Agnes

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Stern little lady,ancestor in an oval frame,I like the way your shoulders slopeand your fingers dangleover the book and the carpetbag skirt.I like the way your…

Cemetery Walk

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. It was somewhere around here, I think.Where they buried that baby,yeah, the one I told you about.No, not by the pioneer obelisksa wife for each sidefresh…

The Garden I Know

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. In his artistic agony,diamond drops of bloodcovered Christ’s chiseled body,sacred sweat shimmeredin the light of the Passover moon.The Son of God, an altarpiece,in serene pain and…

Third Place: Penitent Magdalene, Donatello

Shock of agingin a wooden sculpture—more than yearsdisplayed here,her gauntand weathered faceportraying time had its way—sunken eyes,broken teeth,parched and haggard lips. The cathedralof her handsforms a gothic archbelow her chinsuggesting prayer,her frail body embracedby heavy…

First Place: His Own Hand

I desire to be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.—Theologica Germanica i. What the Right Hand Is Take my right hand—the index finger crookedfrom a long-forgotten break; the dintwhere…

Second Place: Our Lady of Innumerable Appellatives

Listen to the Out Loud version of the poem here. Enter into Her gates with thanksgivingand into Her courts with praise.—Psalm 100:4 1.Swirl of gold gleaming in our daughters’ eyes.Amen. Whorl of cirrostratus haloingthe moon.…

Saint George, Utah

Listen to the audio version here. Not named for the Saintwho met the princess bythe lake and with her girdleleashed the dragon. Who killed it for the people’s conversion.Whose chapel in Windsorholds a part of…

Bear One Another’s Burdens

Getting there

Paper Route

Podcast version of this piece. Sabbath afternoon in summer sometimes feelslike those February mornings I’d wedge thedamp butt of each newspaper in friend’s saddlepack clouded gray with his indistinguishablefingerprints. Their buckling mouths a smudgedbouquet of…

From the Angels’ Perch at Mount Moriah

Podcast version of this piece. Scene: Thicket for a Slaughter We have seenbets, contests— only the greatones sent tospar with God: father, son,sacrifice. Scene: An Examination Question:the brain, a tangledbramble—the fire and the knife,a fearsomebinding.…

Recreating Abraham’s Star Charts

Podcast version of this piece. I pause on the path, drop my sticks,and bend to read them like runes.Tell the stars, They said. So I do daily— I chart their breathless turning asI gather berries…

Addendum to Jacob Sorensen’s Patriarchal Blessing

Podcast version of this piece. I don’t know, Jake,why Dad asked me to drive you there,but I did hear every word Brother Allen said,and here’s a few he skipped: Our Heavenly Fatheris pleased with your…

Ministry of angles

Podcast version of this piece. You who more than oncespelled angle when meaning angel,are now one—maybe both.A sharp line on white paperdriving hardand fastin another spacewhose numbersI do not know. YetIn the arithmeticof our individual…

Morning Light

Podcast version of this piece. That dark matter that fashioned us, days laterMade light by command, what voice, I wonderCould shake atoms into place and stir invisibleWaves through the air, as something we cannot seeAllows…

Tender Rills

Podcast version of this piece. If Gods are poeming Kolob,if I am poeming God, if we arepoems to each other, A word is more than a destinationthan a path, than a map. A word is…

Prism

Podcast version of this piece. They had agreedthat if she were seenthe boy wouldn’t be believedin seeing them.Nevertheless, she was there,her iridescent spherea coronaover their column of sun,reflecting,refractingthe morning.The flowers turned to her,the green of…

God the Mother Speaks of Salt

Podcast version of this piece. I baptized you before you were born. After, rubbed you clean.I’ll cleanse all your wounds in season. You’ve forgottenhow to savor my holy. If you seek,you’ll find these veins run…

God the Mother Speaks of Xenia

Podcast version of this piece. I AM the children sleeping under mylar in a Texas warehouse.I AM the fathers lifting toddlers to their shoulders on our journeyto safety and rest. I’m safety and rest. But…

Benediction

Podcast version of this piece. Here’s the truth: My faith remainstepid. Lukewarm as summer rain. Spew-worthy. A compass in fragments, I saved pieces: base plate, arrow, needle.Reassembly is beyond me. Millennia ago, I stood on…

Book of Life, for Timothy Liu

Podcast version of this piece. If there is a literal bookon a plinth of filigreed gold, and an angelstanding as sentinel at heaven’s needle-eye entrance, who’s not to sayour names appear etchedon its pages, un-erasable.…

God the Mother Speaks of Hearts

Podcast version of this piece. won’t you agree with me the heart’s a glorious organ moon jelly  a ghost heart throbbing in oceanlily bulb  an earth heart humming undergroundbear  a furred heart curled up in cave’s dark I’m…

Mothersong

Podcast version of this piece. Let us amass our wandering kicks, wondering in awe at thesecostumes her womb hath made. O Motherof the sacred hearts, sing your peasant lullabies before our every sleep. Ring like…

creation story

Podcast version of this piece. He makes the light and the primeval oceans and the rapturous Word, but I have the dirt the ground the chthonic underbelly and sustenance of all. I have the jewel-toned…

Big Bang, with Sternutation and Seer Stones

Podcast version of this piece. i. In the beginning, Mother worked yleminto a loose sphere. A swirl of stray particles, stirred by the breeze blown through herstudio window, circled her workbench, tickled her nose. She…

Ascension, after John Donne

Podcast version of this piece. Embrace the first and forever night,Heartening as this Moon journeys from crestingTo full-figured, and in this ecstasy begins to fallEarthward, pulling me down to orchards heavyAnd underground, into mysteries of…

Acoustic

Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…

Hymn to a Maple

Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…

Salt Lake City, 1957

Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…

Color

Podcast version of this piece. Morning at homelistening to silenceand a solo cello,caressing old books,fog outside,fire inside. Treesin crystal veils,fog-doused sun,Earth’s palette replacedby soot and chalk. No color.Only grays,darker or lighter.No real black.No clean white.…

Book of Mormon Poetry James Goldberg, A Book of Lamentations

A few years ago I was researching poems written about the Book of Mormon. I had read Eliza R. Snow’s “The Lamanite” (adapted from a poem she wrote before becoming a Latter-day Saint titled “The…

Young Gods

Slipping off a Sunday dress—hoping you’ll join me and undress.No more dark slacks and white shirts,corruption of innocence tends to hurt.It’s worship too irreverent for pews,forgive my transgression against a holy muse,but, trust me, crisis…

Casual Violence in Sunday School

John the Baptist was a hairy scorpionwho skittered out from the wildernessand began stinging folksuntil they saw the Holy Ghost. He molted like all prophets do,lived in caves, under rocks,until the predators found him—took his…

The Leper

An armadillo dug up the grassin my parents’ yard last year— the kind that bounce buckshotoff their back and carry leprosy. If only I could do the same:materialize armor, lumber along. I could curl up…

Bi-Bestiary

I suppose only the animals that paired offand shuffled up the rampsurvived the flood. So this Bishop, pointing outthat we would rather flirtthan marry—well, he built an Ark out of the treeslining the church property.He…

Daffodils

Your lips are melting petals,Wilting into my mouth.My tears not clearEnough to revive them. When you learn to fly,Will they forget to dance?Lose their maypole eyelashesAnd languish, lonely, withWings cut. And yet,I pray, make me…

Created in His Image

I.The first lie they told me wasBlonde Jesus. Thick Belinda locks,And blue ocean eyes.He hangs on the cross, whiteLike a tender lamb, orWhite like a lily flower,Or like white snowSmothering brown ground. II.The second lie…

“I Cannot Describe Salt”: Elizabeth Willis, Poets in Exile, and the Church Invisible in the Age of Pandemic

Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato’s Republic with a flippant “if . . . poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her,”[1] Western poets…

Review: Poetry as Ceremony Tacey M. Atsitty, Rain Scald

O Holy People, show me how I am human,how I am soon to sliver. Stay please, for womanor man’s sake. Succor me from a telestial state,where I long to be self-luminous in a slateof granite.…

Candy Dish Sonnet

Already the heart-shaped dish on my end tablelies combed bare: long strips dug out============== a cleaning out============== a scratch in grain, table scraps lain out so comely, meaning to loveor hold cacao or almonds—those striaeof…

Lacing

VII. Sometimes I kneel down to play a gamefrom my childhood. Only then can I feelgrains of gravel, each pebble digs in so real.Sometimes I act as though I am the same,a young girl, rope…

Review: Dayna Patterson, If Mother Braids a Waterfall

Review: Dayna Patterson, Titania in Yellow

Review: Sunni Brown Wilkinson, The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

Review: Michael Lavers, After Earth

Review: Kate Piersanti, Life in Poetry

Review: Jan G. Otterstrom F., Move On

Review: Colin B. Douglas, Into the Sun: Poems Revised, Rearranged, and New

Review: R. A. Christmas, Leaves of Sass

Parousia

She says she was eating or opening a window or just walkingdully along, and always had been, but tonight there might befew angels. These things. Our dogwagging across the foreground, the porchthat still needs fixing…

Matriarchal Blessing

Your hands were on my head first. No formal ceremony. I was an infantand shouting clouds trundled and thundered,atmospheric pressure strangled my stubborn ears refusing airflow.The blue chair in the living room rocked,my cries received…

Grasshoppers in the Jar of the World

The jar is silent because it is full of praise.The grasshoppers are loud because they, too,are full of praise, clicking as they fly. The grasshoppers jump, but the jar is too high.They try to climb,…

Praying on Gravel

Not yet March, already weedsbring me to my kneeswith trowel and bare fingers. Under the loblollythe hellebore are in bloom,a periwinkle or two. The weeds are in the white gravelof the walk. My son has…

Until You Come

Taipei, ’97. I walk past side-streetvendors selling lychee nuts and blackrice cakes, to an acre of bare dirt,concrete pylons lifting a cloverleaf.A grizzled man by a beat-up Buickthrows gobbets of meat from the trunkto a…

James Goldberg and Ardis Parshall, Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic

His Twelve Points of the Scout Law (Grandpa Fesses Up)

Sunni Brown Wilkinson. The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

“To speak to Moses, God / put a stone in his mouth, put on / a sackcloth of verbs (want, need), / cleared his throat. Cried out” (3). Sunni Brown Wilkinson this way begins her collection The…

Karen Anderson’s Excavation of Ghosts Karin Anderson. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

Mark 5:9—“My name is Legion: for we are many”—opens Karin Anderson’s masterwork Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Anderson lyrically pools her ancestral narrative in sweeping loops, eddying history, religion, and landscape. Ghosts speak elusive,…

Becky, Not God

set the hour for their reunion.She’s under the greencanopy in the closed coffin. She signed away her body,except for her skin,so her hip bones might be recycled into screws to repair broken anklesor wedges to…

The Stars Saw God

I found God huddled in my father’s insanity.There beneath the layersof confusion—as to why none of us saw thespinning ball or the parade outside—I saw his vacant expression shine out likeGod-rays through the clouds.Clarity in…

Daryl Prays, The Snake River, and Insomnia

Daryl Prays How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! Lamentations 4:1 At fourteen, Daryl cut across an empty lotbehind a brick pharmacywhere he had picked up his mom’s pills(linden…

Genesis Chiasmus

In the Big Ending,My son used to sayWhen I read him the Genesis board book.Which was perfect, I thought.Such a start must surely have followedAn ending that was big.What brought that ending on? And whatGave…

Born Again

Because I did not fit a second timein the womb of my mother,I was born of my father instead. He held my arm to haul me from the waterand with the other, squared it to…

Women’s Blessing

Issue of Blood

Explaining God the Mother to My Father

Self Portrait in Which I Fail to Hide My Daddy Issues From Google

Willing the Storm

On Women and Priesthood Power

Mother’s Blessing

Reason Stares

A Found Poem

The “Blackblue Heartguts” of Trees Brooke Larson. Pleasing Tree.

Third Watch

Vernal

Dry Tree

True Religion

The Agreement

The Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse

Advent: Moose in Moonlight

Creek Skating

Bridegroom

Jesus Christ

New & Everlasting

Sweater

The Moldau in a Utah Living Room

The Mormon Peace Gathering

Sunday School

Judas

Devotion

Prodigal Daughter

What Ashmae Taught Me

Circles and Lines

January 21, 2019

Our Lady of the Temple

Prayers for the Altars

Friday Morning Shift

Skin of Garments

My New Temples

Then and Now

Limen

Ritual

Placenta

Dream Psalm

Walking Back to the ‘70s

Talitha koum

On Cherubim and a Flaming Sword by J. Kirk Richards

Review: It’s Lonely at the Top Ryan Shoemaker. Beyond the Lights.

Review: Mother, May We? Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Edited by Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido.

The Older Covenant

The Tree at the Center

One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days

The Pioneer Woman, St. George

Self-Portrait of Mormon Middle Child as Isabella

After the Curtain Falls, Isabella Speaks in Achromatics

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Raking

the fog

Soft

A Better Country

Poema de Halloween, 2001

Alpha

Sonnet—For Solstice

Agency of all that matters

Choose Your Own Belief: Of Sharks, Art, & God

Forgotten Birds

Domestiku

The Goodness of Created Things

If Joseph Smith Had Been Born in California

As If Nothing Matters

Faith

At Least

Trevor at the Fountain

Grand Canyon, North Rim

Ajalon Moon

The Holy Ghost in Polyhymnia’s Closet

The Holy Ghost in Melpomene’s Closet

Echo of Boy

Nosebleed (A Mormon Pilgrimage)

Christus

The Grammar of Quench

Not the Truman Show

Solomon the Wise

Averted Vision

Elegy / Prayer

True Ideas

My Sadness

The Skin of the Story

The Flock

Words

Eight Visions of the First

Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 151–155
Shiffler-Olsen turns Joseph Smtih’s first-person First Vision accounts into poetry.

Temple

Keeping Faith

October Above Trial Lake

Stony Places

My Sister Once Died

Grief

The Trail

The world was divided into three.  Three shards of sagebrush and sky.  That’s how it looked to Emma as she blinked through the thick wooden wagon spokes next to her head. She winced at the…

Baptism

Ordinary and Profane Poems

Tropical Butterfly House

Kill the Poets

Prophet by the Sea

One late afternoon just before sunset, the Prophet with white hair like the mane of a lion was walking by the sea with his friend, Fernando. They walked and talked about many things as the…

Mormon Conversions

From Utah Poems: To Elias

I brought my daughters to your grave
There in the river’s bend 
Not far from where, their age, 
I watched you dedicate the monument
To Jim Bridger: trapper, river-searcher. 

You lay deep in Utah’s summer
So still they couldn’t imagine 
This was their grandfather, 
Yourself a monument now 
To probing dry country.

Boy Diving Through Moss

A boy with joy and fear inside
stood on the plank
above the pond.
He sensed the cold, dark water
underneath,
and, daring,

Mental Gas

Charles to his teacher—Sir, you say
That nature’s laws admit decay—
That changes never cease ; 
And yet you say, no void or space ;
‘Tis only change of shape or place—
No loss, and no increase. 

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen

Dr. Clinton F. Larson has been acclaimed as a Mormon poet, even as the first Mormon poet. In his review of The Lord of Experience Professor John B. Harris seems to have represented many of…

The Poetic Mystique | Marily McMeen Miller Brown, The Grandmother Tree, and Vernice Wineera Pere, Mahanga: Pacific Poems

Beyond the sentience and the craft, under the sound and shape and color of the poem, one seeks the mystique that synthesizes and sets forth a poet’s real reality. Marilyn McMeen Miller  Brown’s book of…

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

The sensibility described by Amy Lowell—that there is something odd about women who write serious poetry—is still given substance today by the endangered state of the species. Even I will not waste time counting the few woman poets anthologized before Lowell’s time; contemporary statistics suffice.

Persephone

The trees are making white 
buds. Shrunken heads, 
last year’s berries, hang 
on leafing branches. I do not

Hold

Gray day with a brown leaf refusing 
at the end of a wind to drop, 
why is the crabbed clinging 
so intricate a part of the dance? 

Repapering the Kitchen

We probe and scrape and peel away the faded 
Multicolored layers of a lifetime, 
Like Schliemann 
(Who ? Grandmother asks) 

Gratitude

As I kneel to 
needlepoint nice words 
in quiet 
careful 

Memory’s Duty

Like an irresistible green vegetation 
easing over everything in time, 
a sense of comfort crept over my mother, 
weaving into her slowly tendrils of death. 

Bronzed Cadences

I hear faded trumpet sounds of summer 
and fill my arms with sleepy wildflowers, 
hold them close, feel the damp, 
smell the last fragrance. 

The Golden Chain

Paradise pendant from a golden chain 
opal pendant paradise 
swirling blue and green 
through white cloud streaks: 
golden chain gleaming on the breast of God. 

“Moonbeams From a Larger Lunacy”: Poetry in the Reorganization

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 22–31
This study addresses poetry within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and defines an RLDS poet as someone who belongs to the RLDS church and who has published poetry in some form or other.

The New Mormon Poetry | Lewis Home, The seventh day

A new Mormon poetry is beginning to emerge from the shadow of traditional, more bardic Mormon verse. Peeping about in the bright sun, blinking a bit and rubbing its eyes, it shows itself in poems…

Still Sounds of Winter

Waking from my loud dream 
I hear only what is here: 
the cornered stars rattling in glass 
and the slow roll of a drumhead moon. 

Charm for a Sick Child

we will dream now of a cave 
with a figure at the entrance, 
see the magic seeds she holds 

Another Birth

They dream of going hack. 
            The bars on their beds 
            are fingers before a face. 
Their knees rise up toward chins 

Fishers

In the last days of summer 
we walk through tall grass 
to the river 
long before the sun spills 

Expatriate

The Hawaiians are surprised that we also had beaches. 
            In their minds we represent one vast igloo 
            Filled with people anxious to escape 
            To winter in Hawaii. 

Born Again

As you enter the water unsinning, 
I shall repent eight years 
Of watching in the dark and loving 
Without turning on the light. 

Oil upon Oil

Like the sound of laying the warp, whispered names 
resonate within the grained, muraled, marble 
and curtain walls of this holy place, and veil 
the light and air with your form, hands 

How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering

The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…

Unfinished Sestina for the Secretary of Defense

We were inside the world. 
The children were sleeping. 
Light fell through the window. 
One of us wore red. 

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

Returning

Mouth over the reed, 
you empty your feelings 
into the hollow heart. 
These are the pieces left: 

Diaries

I keep diaries in my head 
At night I write on sealed pages 
In dream codes a         sort 
Of dot-dot-dash Morse himself 

David and Bathsheba

When I slid the damask 
from its plastic sleeve 
to spread it on the table, 
the stain throbbed against crisp white. 

Fathering

When I first hold our children, 
Lately having labored alongside you, 
I promised many things — too many — 
Like the alcoholic too late repentant, 

The Interview

Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…

Benediction

Ardmoore told Carmen Stavely, who’d been away in Idaho visiting family, that what happened that Sunday morning was absolutely confidential. The bishop had instructed all who’d been present to keep the matter strictly to themselves;…

Lightning Barbs

I’d ridden this way a hundred times, 
Up Monday Town along the fence 
Dividing wheat from perennial sage 
Herding cattle to summer grazing 

One Year

The scene was written 
In advance, 
Rehearsed as often 
As the days of waiting 
Would allow. 

As Winter Comes On

Beyond my chrysanthemums and barbed fence, 
aproned sisters, some in hair nets like cafeteria cooks, 
whisk their casseroles to the kitchen of the old wardhouse. 

This Is My Body

A deacon offers the broken bread. 
Aware of awkward wait as bishop 
Receives the bread of ritual first, 
I take it up, thoughtless of blessing, 

All My Silent Midnight Hours

Things just get worse.
Which heavenly linoleum stripe
Leads to universal Emergency?
The resident angel could scour my soul.

Grains of Life: Fragments of a Sonnet Cycle

If I could give to you a dew-wrapped day, 
You have no need to tell me — I should know 
That you would use it all to make things grow. 
The furling bud, the fruiting branch are pay 

Sonnet for Spring

there’s honeysuckle in the exhaust, a fine green 
beard between walks, spring softens us 
again, now we confess the earth is a drum 
encased in living skin, not concrete, 

For the Bishop’s Wife

Some of us stood together 
on your star-gray lawn, 
sang you Christmas carols 
in the warm California air. 

Grandmother Envisions Her Own Death

A white pillar will glow from the sand as I die. 
Those backyard trees will shake their empty pods 
against the sky. My moldy body will sink 
into its bed, smothered by sinners. 

Winter Burial

Grey clouds, March-heavy hung over 
an old and mottled snow that day 
we brought him there to you. 

Seasoning

That fine white burst of bush blossom 
Has come again. Blast 
ing through the winter crust 
And scattering the afterbirth of spring, 

Nativity

The eyes of the beasts shine into my own. 
The archangel’s hair is on fire. I stumble 
through the mudprints of cows and ewes 
toward the damp side of the cave 

They Have Closed the Church My Father Helped Build

where he sawed through his finger 
now perpetually stiff, 
paid three assessments 

Evenings: His Church Calling

The sound burrs in my head 
like a racket of angry birds 
swirling from the sky. 
He’s gone again; 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Cancun Beach, Mexico

What kind of God has made this sapphire tide 
stroking the white sand mouth of Yucatan, 
outrageously extravagant, a place 
fit for the baptism of God or kings 

Sons

New grain, you are comely; 
Long, straight, supremely vernal. 
Standing in Earth’s sun 
Unashamed green, 
You sway. 

Recollections from an Ex

mused in several voices 
to the tune of tinkling cymbals 

It wasn’t like she didn’t blend right in. 
In fact, based on the type of clothes she wore, 
People always figured she was from Salt Lake. 
Her skirts were long enough, that’s for sure.

For Brother de Mik

Cupped in your papery palm the rose 
was like a wound, flowering. 
Your wife nodded when we brought it. 
Yes, Papa, yes is pretty. Then 
she put it in a bowl to float 
and wilt on water. 

Lulu: On the Death of a Sister

Gone 
from the pampas. 
The only brunette; 
her first airplane flight at six months. 

Discouragement

                  Discouragement, 
is the adversary’s vision of the work 
revealed to and 

Stones; The Salutation; The Problem; Grandmother, Grandmother, Grandmother; Bishop

Feliz Navidad

No room at the inn, 
For them, anyway. 
It didn’t take ESP to read the situation. 
Just avoiding unpleasantness later. 
He had enough on his mind just then. 

Our Way

we were young 
and war was our way 
we’d fight in class 
or after school 

Luggage

You are required to keep the poundage low: 
two large cases and a carry-on: 
what you take for months overseas. 
In a year of famine, you have volunteered 

Pruned

I have always been a flowering vine, 
Seeking new trellises to trail on, 
Climbing ladders to the sky, 
Lusting over neighbor fences 

To Watch a Daughter Die

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Prayer of a Novice Rebel

Don’t try to drop little nuggets. 
Please, Sir, I mean. 
Or give me too much of a sign. 
I don’t want a sign now— 

Bodies

Weight — 
heavy weighting down 
of airier stuff 
in birth 

A Life Well-Shared | Margaret Rampton Munk, So Far: Poems

In the Fall of 1985 DIALOGUE published Meg Munk’s suite of poems entitled, “One Year.” In a mature voice and through particular images, she dramatized her battle with cancer. In the spring of 1986, this…

Winton Night Walks

At night along the canals 
Dad was best. 
Beside narrow dusty tractor roads 
Slow dark waters, 

August 6

“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!” 
I went, thanking for the first time the crook 
In my spine that stopped me buck naked 
From buck privacy, and took me back to you 

To a Modern Isaac

I’m no Abraham. 
I’ve bowed to a few idols in my day — 
Just somewhat unintentioned. 
Sacrificing children to idols 

Navel

I drive by a red farmhouse 
in the setting sun. Orange morning 
darts through rippled glass. 
High-glossed linoleum 

The Oldest Son Leaves for Nagoya

Surprisingly tall, he looks down toward 
His six-inch shorter father 
And shifts his feet, anxious 
For the moment of departure, awkward in uncertainty

Burial Service

The place they put him seemed extravagant — 
Sprawling flowers, hovering crowd, artificial grass 
To cover up plain dirt. 
The coffin shone, wood lustrous as the new organ 

For Bonnie

Ever since the homestead days, when you, 
The eldest, baked the bread for barefoot boys 
Flushed from the corn for lunch, the care we knew 
Was testimony of your oaken poise. 

Here’s the Church

While the organist pumped 
“Let Us All Press on in the Work of the Lord,” 
and the chorister napped her arms 
like a whooping crane, and some sat there 

Failed Friendship

Sisters nod and smile, 
inclining intimately toward her in the crowded room. 
Years of testimonies shared and friendships deified 
linger in the worn cushions and heavy curtains. 
She brushes jostling shoulders, turns and feels 

Lesser Voices

Sun-circled history 
Paints famous fools 
But leaves plain brown men 
Unremarked 

sonnet on life’s dangers

cop and father, he cautioned us of more 
than boogeymen and fire, in case of snakes, 
freeze where you are, same for skunks and por-
cupines, brave enough to tromp on cracks, 

The Lord’s Table

The banquet table was spread, 
But I could no longer smell 
Satisfaction in the room. 

Two Fishermen in Hong Kong

We couldn’t find anyone 
in that inner-city maze. 
Between thick buildings 

Three Poems for My Mother

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Early Through Winter

Someone went shooting rabbits last night 
blasting any flesh too slow to dodge. 

I track the powdered ground until I toe 
a scarlet gash melted to concrete.

Pure Thin Bones

José Luís was sick. That was why Michelle and Renata stopped by to see him on their way home from missionary zone meeting. They walked with Nielsen, his companion, who had gone to the meeting…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Grandpa

you talk of breakaway stallions 
with hooves poised to strike teeth, 
years on long lean roads past Las Vegas 
selling church pews down the valley. 

Passion Poems | Emma Lou Thayne, How Much for the Earth?

One might suspect that a book of poems published by Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms Race might possess as interesting a history as the poems that comprise it. How Much for the Earth? by…

A Lot to Like: Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems edited by Eugene England and Dennis Clark

One of the Women

The Slow Way Home

Deity

Daddy Hung Me Out

The Blood in My Veins

If I Had Children

I Can Wait For

Heartbreak Hill

The Next Weird Sister Builds a Dog Run

Transformation

Call Before the Obituary

Island Spring

Innocence

I Consider Jonah’s Whale

Burn Ward

Sisters

Being Baptized for the Dead, 1974

In the Back Lot at Hillview Manor

Baptism: As Light as Snow

One Sunday’s Rain (After Word of My Father’s Illness)

The Dark Gray Morning

Cure

The Virgin Mary Confronts Mary and Magdala

How Could We Have Known

The Perseids

Mechanics

The Hero Woman

Patchwork

Losing Lucy

Nickel Girls

Over Coffee, 600 B.C.

Song of the Old/Oldsongs: Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women edited by Leatrice Lifshitz

Ovum

The Good Life

Jackrabbits

Waiting

A Vision of Judas

Two Sisters Visit Dieppe

Celebrations: Things Happen: Poems of Survival by Emma Lou Thayne

When I Swam for the Utah Valley Dolphins

The Mistake of the Psycholinguists

Art and Half a Cake

My Mormon Grandmother

Coney Island Hymn: Shore

The 20/20 Leap

Ecclesiastical Check

Woman Bathing ; Authority

Hands

Missionary Court

Late

Relativity

Return

Manna in the Desert

Variation on a Love Letter

The Book Handed Her

Winter Fast Offerings

Entire Unto Himself

The Pulpit

Yellow Hair

Sestina for the Coming Fall

Saint Theresa and the Lepress

What El Salvador Meant to a Three-year-old

Beth-lehem

Night Myths

Notes for a Son, 19, Living Abroad

Snowy Night

Becoming a Writer

Breadcrumbs

Exercising the Priesthood

Postcard

Litany

Household of Faith

God With Us

A Body That Expands

Double Exposure

Sacrament Prayer

Brando

Warren Travels With His Father

Decoration Day

Day Dreams

Sole Makers

The Man Without Sin

Lancashire Saint Dies

Leave of Absence

Resurrection

Our Fecundity

For My Father, 1934-1990

Mama and Daddy Standin’ By

In Passing To Her Fathers

Bean Counting

I Have Learned 5 Things

Aspens

Magi

Commentary

Ireland

To Joseph of Nazareth: Patron Saint of Fathers Dispossessed

Hobby Horses

Movements Giving Off Light

Mummy Pendulum

Sariah

Jesus is Coming

Marcus

Secrets under the Surface: Crazy for Living: Poems by Linda Sillitoe

The Invisible Woman

Going Dark

Serving the Papers

His Sermon

Nestling

For the Girl Who Saw Her Mother Cold

A Courtship

On X-ing

My Mama’s Hands

Storytime

Early Winter

Clean

In a Far Land

Pilgrimage

Basilica

Bathing a Child

The Violent Woman

Naked

Cap Meets the Prophet Brigham

1844

Snows

The Time Traveler Comes to Cana

March Children

Negative Space

Razor Sharp

1948

The Three Boats

Weight

Hospital Healing

Sleeping on Wood

RELEASE: A Moment

The Freeway

How Things Look from the Other Side of the Lake

Cereal Polygamy

Brides of the Afternoon

Slant Sonnet for Melissa

Ghost Month

Reply to: “You Are a Spiritual Person”

Toni’s Song

Because Last Night Was Friday Night

Saturday: One Version (Fourth Week of an Unidentified Illness)

The Prophet’s Dream

What Remains

Aristocrats

His Faith-Promoting Story

Bread: A Returning

The Statue of Brigham Young at South Temple and Main, Salt Lake City

I Will

Hemmed In

A Killing Frost

George

Descending Order

Untitled

Fall Weekend at Rehoboth Beach

In a Far Land

They Eat Dogs in China

Gaining Darkness

American Christians Visit Mt. Nebo

The Miro Exhibit at MoMA: Dec. 21, 1993

Pieta

She’iina Yazhi

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

By Extension

August

The Greening

Origami Birds

Properties of Water

Seconds Coming

Awake to the Ineffable: Some Would Call It Kundalini

To Sleep with the Ineffable: Inviting My Sweet Informants

The Soon-to-hibernate Bear Addresses His Public

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

Dialogue 29.4 (Winter 1996): 119–135
The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

Leaving

Black Moroni

Life-line

Silver Footprints

Alaska Girlhood

We Dress for Armageddon

Kick and Muff

Shorn

Passing On, Holiday

Fire in the Water

Oasis

Desert Bloom

Stake Mission

Kayenta

Moon Phases: Childhood

Mountain Turn-out: Week After My Father’s Funeral

Father Sky/Mother Earth

How She Comes

Fall is the Wrong Analogy

Martyrs

On the Death by Cancer of Someone Too Young

Woodwork

Take These Depositions

Straw

Birthday Dreaming

“Watercress Grows Best in Running Water”

Lily Foot

Templum: A Place Thought of as Holy

After a Late Night, Waiting

Out of the Night: Childness

Sacrament Hymn

From the Land of Nod

Holy Sonnet for Mother’s Day

History

A Prayer Addressed to Lord of Death

Mormontage

Allelujah

Long Distance

At Fifty-Five

Alder and Maple in Molting

Creations: Mississippi

Multiply and Replenish

Sesquicentennial Pioneer Commemoration Speech

Soft Sculpture

Basic Training

She and He: Alternatives

Lectures on Death at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

On the Fringe — The Singles’ Ward (The Appeal of the Foyer)

Widow’s Weeds

Thistle Field

Straight Up

Miguel

One Method of Hope

Lucifer’s Obit.

Begotten of the Ash

Joseph Loved His Women

To a Cymbidium Orchid

Fashion Show

Ordinary Light

Fact of my Life

We Write What We Want to Know

My Father Comes to Me

To a College Friend Killed by a Drunk Driver

Drama Queen

Night Fires

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

A Name and a Blessing

Luke 7:37

Courting

If the Din of Cities Makes the Moon

Dragging Fanny

Afterward

Above the Estuary

Metaphysics Over Lunch

Caught Gull, Plowing

Companionship

Clay

The First Christmas Eve at Home

Practicing at Sunrise

Natural Symmetry

Night Thunder at the Cabin

Military Funeral in a High Hills Cemetery

Day Music

Wild Things

Plain and Simple

Temple Square — Past and Present

Reclamation

Grandma Comes for Me

Thin Ice

Fertility

Naked

Hop Hornbeam

From Under Ground

Planting Day

Trajectory at the End of Winter

Russell

Jesus Lost

Through a Glass Darkly

Under the Faultline

The Basic Tune of the Sparrow

The Charity of Silence

This is the story of my father’s demise. It wanders when I tell it, and I never know when to bring in the polygamy, so I just do and let matters take care of themselves.…

The By-pass

If I looked up the road from the irrigation ditch, I could see the church house bumping stiff and dark against the sunset’s blaze. “The old church house/’ people called it now. “The old churchhouse,”…

Salt Lake Citations

A friend writes: In a walking excursion last fall through the old block lying between Fifth and Sixth East, Seventh and Eight South—in a narrow alley behind Charon’s Mexican Bakery—I came across a shop of…

Thin Ice

Emma’s Anguish

Joseph to Emma

Winter Dies

Indian Summer

Pah Tempe

Parched

In Riverdale

In a Pueblo Indian Dwelling, Four-Corners

Anhedonia

Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of article as a courtesy. Please note that there may be unintentional differences from the printed version. For citational and biographical purposes, please use the printed version…

Learning to Disappear

Sensing Spirits

An Act of Faith

Maps of Time

Commonplace Nightmares

History of the Church — Part One

Coming Home

Love is a Delicate Chain

Being World

About My Conversion: Directions to a Nonbeliever

Forever Family

Plenty

Spiritualizing the Organic

In the Kitchen on a Saturday Morning

Lament for My Eyes in a Mirror

The Handing

Proud Flesh

The Rose Jar

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

Encounter

Balsamic Vinegar

Wedding Vows

Without Question

Eve’s Psalm

Aspiration

Sestina of the Martyrdom

On a Morning After New Snow and a Winter of Healing Inside

The Passing Lane

Miracle of Wood

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

Syllabus

Remuneration

Water Will

Trouble in Eternity

Nobody’s Grandpa

The Empty Cistern

Disrobed

I Add Craig to My Prayers

Gardner’s Song

Red’s Tire Barn Titans

Archaeopteryx

Night Light

Childhood Homes

Vicarious

Liahona

Christian Spinning

Listening to the Lord

Breach Birth: Aug. 20, 1891

Utah Territory, 1893

Delineation

Alive in Mormon Poetry

Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture

The Woman of Christlike Love

Almost Pentecostal

A Motherless House

The Middle Path, Colorized

We Were Not Consulted

The Right Place

Night Work Near Escalante

You Owe Me

Antler People v. Womb People

Contralto

The Mothers’ Antlers

Inheritance

Nothing We Needed to Know

Cargoes II

War Bride

The Cedars of Lebanon

Aladdin’s Lamp, March 4, 2003 on the eve of first strike in Iraq

Movement: Out of Doors, Out of Town, In Dangerous Times

Gene, My Eternal Brother

Blind Tears

Heart Mountain

Resurrection

Yahrzeit

The Meadow

Eve’s Offering

Afield

Death to the Death of Poetry!: The Art is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

Nov 1, 2001

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999

The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North

The Fall of My Fiftieth Year

Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

Reading into Dusk

Ambulance Unit

The Banality of Evil

Prayer for a Grandchild

Baptism

El Cordero de Dios

A Spinster Physician Weeps While Speaking Her Sermon on Abstinence: A Sonnet without Rhyme

Triptych-History of the Church

Martin in Me

Confession

Thousand Springs

Sorrow and Song

Women in a Time Warp: Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, Edited by Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe

Salad for Two

The Good Shepherd

The Peach

Family Tree

Faith Healing

Churchgoers

The Orchid Grower

Triple A’s

The Elect

Scriptum Est

My Brother’s Bed

My Brother Was Buried Wearing a Red Jacket

Brooklyn: City of Churches

Old Rodeo Man

Carol Took the Call

Everlasting

Bliss

The Holding Room

Guest Room

Sheep Ranch Near Hillspring

On Reading a Blank Page

Jonah in the Belly

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

Washing Mother

Tonkas

Fruit

Orisons

Mouths

Summer Dam

Upon the Face of the Water

Reflections on Darkness and Light

Where Are the Horses?

Compass

Graduation

poetry on the ‘fridge door

Showshoe Song

Borax

Dining with the Devil: A Long Spoon: Poems by R. A. Christmas

Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony

At the End of the Street Lies the Sky

Sonnet to Japanese Spring

Black Handkerchief

Wedding Flower

After My Brother’s Remission

Some with Shadows

While Planting Hollyhocks

Yorick

The Clearing

I Teach Six-Year-Olds about Jesus in Sunday School

Hunter’s Visitation

Nephews

Patriarchal Blessing

To My Teacher

Moving the Story, with Conviction: On the LDS Church and the Marriage Amendment

Land’s End 1997

The Word

One Tree

Spring Variations on a Theme by Lorenzo Snow

Mechanical Failures

Three-Legged Dog

A Proposal

City of Brotherly Love

Beautiful Black Madonna of Czestochowa

Caught Up

Epithalamium

Fidelity to Objects

Necktie

Grace

The Local Police Report

Jesus Was There

Always with Us

Curious

Change

Man, dust

Multi-level Marketing

Glaucus

One Tree Redux

Pierce the Veil

Salt Lake City Cemetary: Jewish Section

White Rain (forty years since our meeting)

Flying Out

What Rocks Know

Sober Child

Neshutan

A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal

Abba: The Name of God

Etching

On Losing My Cell Phone

Oceanography

Relinquishing

Gentle Dad

Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering

A Perfect World

The Man with One Foot Outside of Hell

Handmaid

Our First Home Has Forgotten Us

Contingency #4: White Out

From Outside the Settlement

Untitled

Sheets

the god of small things

Things Missed

Time Being

In this Version of Autumn

Sisyphus

Ripple Rock

The Leg

Internal Affairs

Blue Glass

Abracadabra

Bum Bam Boom

Flannel Board

Turncoat

Romance

An Apocalypse

Accidental Mystic

Marginalia

Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother

Mother Willow

Winterscape: Prairie

Seasonal Ritual

Easter Sermons

Gaius

Dishes

Intermission Wine

Sex Talk Sunday

Listening to My Parents Through the Ventilator Shaft

Blessing My Son

Vitae

Visible from Here

Dark Energy

Four Passes on Mount Horeb

Good Government in the City

Nazarín

San Diego Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints

The Afternoon Hour

Atlanta to Salt Lake

Revelation

After Her Stroke

Finding Place

Runaway

Mass Transit Madonna

Perplexed by the Revelator’s Heaven

Review: Tyler Chadwick, ed. Fire in the Pasture 21st-Century Mormon Poems

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

“Epithalamion” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fern Hill Revisited

Janie Goodmansen’s Reply

Sixth-Grade Broadway Revue

Inaccuracy

Hobble Creek Almanac

Graphene

A Short Poem about Nearly Everything

In Those Days of My Spirit: A Found Poem

Same-Sex Attraction

Blessed Virgin

This Dock My Home

Fractals

Ghazal

The Feather Pen

Glazier

Offerings

Singing in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy

Puzzled

Emptying Pockets

Beyond (on the Beach)

The Hosanna Shout

Sabbath Baptism

Melancholia

Easter

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

IRRELEVANT—RELEVANT

For Margene

About Half

evidence of things not seen

Jungle Walks

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Shade

Evenings in October

Not Far Off Trail, Late Summer

Crow Games

Haiku for the Cat

Blood Cries

Oblation

Faith

Let Rocks Their Silence Break

Review: When Good is Better than Great: Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt Susan Elizabeth Howe. Salt: Poems

Review: Job: A Useful Reading Michael Austin. Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poems