Category Archives: Poetry

Anabaptist-Mennonite writing, Doubt, Faith, gratitude, inspiration, love of God, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Do I Dare, a poem by Joseph Gascho

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If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. —Psalm 139:9-10

Do I dare to tell my Darwin friends
about the giant hand
that led my surgeon’s hand
for six whole hours?

Do I dare to tell my Dawkins friends
about the gentle hand
that held me
for 40 days?

Do I dare to think
it was no dream,
that gentle, giant hand,
holding me,
lovingly?

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul: A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (Wipf and Stock, 2023) .

Mennonite poet, Poetry

AAA Baseball, by Joseph Gascho

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The pitcher on the local team was a farmer boy
who sometimes had to leave the game
bottom of the seventh to milk the cows.
He had a wicked curve, but no control. Thought
it was something I could do
so I nailed laths to the barn,
stepped off 60 feet and every evening
after chores.
I’d hurl the ball an hour or two.
Got good enough to hit the strike zone
almost every time, looked up
in the World Book how to grip the ball
so it would curve, heaved extra bales of hay
to bulk my forearm muscles up
and by the year I turned 18
I joined the team, lost only once all year.
Last game there was a scout
who’d heard about my perfect game,
said I had the stuff
and by 21 I made the AAA club
in Omaha, pitched 20 times, waited
for the Sox to call me up.
They never did. Don’t know
what might have been had I played
Little League at five, had Dad paid
someone to show me how to throw,
had been molded from a different mix of DNA.

I heard my kids the other day
bragging to their friends
about my trophies on the wall.
That night I pitched them in the trash.

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul. A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (forthcoming, Wipf and Stock) .

gratitude, inspiration, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Winter Color, by Julia Baker Swann

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I hear a slow summer wind in this sponged carpet of russet needles
under my feet. Smoldering burnt orange around silver tree roots and evergreen.

Husks of tall blonde meadow grasses sway in the barely-breeze.
Skeleton seeds wait, gold even without light.

Rocks splattered with the creep of fungus and lichen. White, yellow,
and neon.
In the warm pockets around each stone’s breath, bright clover tests growth.

When inside my home the clouds are a heavy drape.
I crave the sun-spill across the floor.

When I go out the moss grey sky is a complex churn.
I would need violet, black, and even a dab of rose to paint these layers.

The subtle hues ask me to quiet. To clothe myself
in terracotta and winter-berry, silver-tone, tawny down,

deer-skin, dusted pine, honey-sap and moth-wing white.
To chant these muted colors like a bold prayer,

treasuring the particular sounds.

—Julia Baker Swann is completing an MA in Theopoetics and Writing at Bethany Theological Seminary and is poetry editor at Geez Magazine. She is author of The Moon Is Always Whole, her first poetry collection (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2020).

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Mennonite poet, Poetry, Writing

Country Night, by Jean Janzen

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Lying awake I remember branches
scraping the night window, I, a child
away from my crowded home to my
cousin’s spacious country rooms,
she and I in separate beds.

How to hold the memory of my heart
racing in the dark, the small body
curled, the wind wild? How to hold
that child until dawn ignites the leaf
with its tiny separate rooms,
the stem clinging?

—Jean Janzen, a poet living in Fresno, California, is the author of six previous collections of poetry who has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and other awards. A graduate of Fresno Pacific University and California State University of Fresno, she has taught at Fresno Pacific and Eastern Mennonite University. Janzen is author of What the Body Knows (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2015).

Awe and wonder, Creation, Grief and loss, hope, inspiration, Poetry

To the Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star, by Kathryn Winograd

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So little you know, wild-winged
and unshaken beneath a dog star,
half-grazing the pines, the bare winter
aspen I stand in the dark wash of
waiting for the tip of a yellow moon.
In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars
circled a pond bull-dozed
by my father, a raft of cattail
where the red-wings spun their nests
above the scrim of caught water.
Tonight, in this near dark, so close
my hand could circle it,
Sirius hovers above the red
factory lights of Pueblo
and the Sangre de Cristo blue-
washed in this hour.
I am cold in this wind,
in this spine of the Milky Way,
these blue white stars named
for a bear or a lyre or a woman
weeping her dead into a river.
I think I was still half-sleeping
in a field of grass, in a haze
of stars, in a far and nameless
country you care nothing
about, burying and unburying
those I love. Such quiet,
the mining trucks to the north
stalled and the little generator
of a shed where no one lives
in winter shut down.
And then, your wings, almost
against the moon. Why
must I always be alone,
searching for something beautiful?

—Kathryn Winograd, a poet and essayist, divides her time between Littleton, Colorado, and a “pie in the sky” cabin her husband and she dreamed of for twenty years before stumbling across forty acres of high meadow ranch land near Phantom Canyon. She is the author of six books, including her most recent collection of essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received the Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her first collection, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, was a finalist in the Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards.  Her poetry collection, Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. She currently teaches for Regis University’s Mile High MFA. She wrote “To Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star” during the first months of the pandemic.

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Mennonite poet, Poetry, Writing

A Writing Place, by Phyllis Miller Swartz

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I had been writing about place—the places of my childhood and the places in a historical fiction book—so when I read the invitation to the Poetics of Place writing retreat, I signed up.

Come to Jacob’s Creek, the invitation had said, in the beautiful Laurel Highlands. The conveners stressed that scheduled activities, according to the brochure, would be offered in the spirit of Ecclesiastes 4:6: “Better is one hand full of quietness than two hands full of toil and striving after the wind.”

But I came with some trepidation. I was a new writer, after all, and I would join a group that included authors of books published by Cascadia, often through its DreamSeeker Books imprint.

Come to relax, a post-registration e-mail told me, and bring ten photocopies of a piece of your work for critique.

Those two sentences, I thought, didn’t fit.

But they did, I found.

One evening we stood on a porch under the rain and heard the words from a poem by Mary Szybist savoring the world’s taste and acknowledging that in exchange for such gifts the poet “did nothing, not even wonder.”

The Poetics of Place conference became for me a call to wonder, to pay attention. There’s something holy about loving the place where you are, someone at the retreat said one evening, and something especially holy about loving a place others don’t love. So notice the signs of life that emerge from the decay of a place.  What are you witness to in the place you live?

Photograph by participant Joseph Gascho.

And I learned to pay attention, close attention, to words. In workshops with people who wrote—a pastor, a musician, a doctor, an editor, a professor, a retired volunteer—I saw how to notice what words are actually saying, as opposed to what was meant. I learned to hear the rhythm of words and to examine each word to find its reason to exist. And I found that to lay my work open for others to see and question and offer impressions and suggestions, is to ask for a gift.

At the retreat we, who loved words, immersed ourselves in them. We plucked words from our ordinary lives and set them on paper so we could see them more clearly. We mediated on God’s call to record words, tracing the biblical commands to write through the Old Testament narratives and the prophets, through the gospels and the epistles, and into Revelation. Even at meals, we played with words in our talk.

When I drove into the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center on the first day of the retreat, I parked my car and sat for a moment, feeling too timid to walk inside, to spend the weekend writing with people I didn’t know and who had written more than I had. But I left the retreat three days later, richer and glad I had come.

—Phyllis Miller Swartz taught school for over 30 years, from HeadStart to middle school, high school, college, and more after “graduating with the hippies from Antioch College.” She is author of Yoder School, a memoir to be released through the DreamSeeker Books imprint of Cascadia Publishing House as the inaugural title in the new DreamSeeker Memoir Series. Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Becca J. R. Lachman, and Anita Hooley Yoder developed the Poetics of Place retreat. They in turn invited participation of Michael A. King and Cascadia Publishing House/DreamSeeker Books, publisher of many of the retreat participants, including Swartz.

Awe and wonder, grace, hope, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Be Not Afraid and other Poems, by Julie Cadwallader Staub

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Be Not Afraid

I am converted and every day:

when the clouds dream
a new dream
and fill the air
with snow

when the pines and hemlocks
lift their needles
and welcome
what sun there is

when the creek,
hard frozen,
listens as the fox
trots along its side.

This world of enchantment
waits for you
like the milkweed
standing in this snowy field

its pod open wide
like angel wings outstretched
ready to catch
the rising wind.

Moth

When Jesus said, “Suffer the little ones to come unto me”

I know he included this inch-long moth
marooned on the bike path
gray wings delicately trimmed in white
a neon orange head
an iridescent blue body.

When I put my fingers down in front of it,
it climbs right into my hand,
happily, I think,

and when I crouch at the edge of the path
to let it go
there is a young apple tree growing there,
sensitive and wood ferns,
buttercups,
a spray of little white asters

for such is the kingdom of heaven.

Slow by Slow

“Secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.” —John O’Donohue

It’s like yeast, they say
or a mustard seed

but I submit
it is also like carpenter ants

the way they work, hidden,
unbidden, unnoticed,

deep within the foundation, the walls,
the very structure of the house

so that one day
light filters through
where a thick wall stood

one day
you see a patch of open sky
where the hardest ceiling had been

one day a door
stands ajar that has been
locked for a lifetime.

Slow by slow
grace finds a way.

Slow by slow
still the gift comes.

—Julie Cadwallader Staub’s poems have been published in various journals, featured on “The Writer’s Almanac,” and included in such anthologies as Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books) and Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers Press). Her poem “Milk” won Hunger Mountain Review’s 2015 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010, and her second collection, Wing Over Wing, will be published by Paraclete Press in 2019 and will include all three poems posted here.

Awe and wonder, Poetry

Along the Shining Sea and other poems, by Clarissa Jakobsons

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Along the Shining Sea

Cumulus pockets of abandon hover

over waves. High tide churns seaweed tufts

close to my chair and feet. I sit on stones

b

listen to the ocean breathe, watching a seal

drift past. Low flying, double-breasted

cormorants head toward the dilapidated

b

pier where several posts remain.

My Canadian friends left this morning, packed

their van by 8 am, kids strapped to back seats

b

with stuffed sharks and 120 plastic critters in a box.

Four-cormorants drift, open mouths anticipating

a free meal. I miss my new little friends,

b

6-year-old Clare and 8-year-old Eliza.

Last night, free hugs and kisses filled old bodies

with warmth. Clare called me the pretty one,

b

Grandma watched, thankful for her first embrace.

Live well, my lovelies. Catch the sails and check-out

the horseshoe crabs on shore. Sleep safe

b

tucked in clouds. Listen to the waves at your feet.

You don’t have to touch bottom when you swim,

just kick,

kick, and kick.

b

Listen to the Great Emptiness

Can you hear the tide turn its head at Sippewissett

Two ocean sunsets lost

forever chased by Hurricane Earl.

The geese are not crying.

b

Falmouth shoppers scurry shopping carts

instead of the sea. I flee Buzzards Bay, Bourne.

Along Route 86 and 17, the Southern Tier Expressway

past Albany, Binghamton, Corning, New York.

b

In a far field, cows and horses cast shade

and Angus nestle like crows.

Evening Primrose opens a window,

a promise. Water

b

lilies tighten under darkening sky

cold rains dampen feet.

Curled hay, bundled and tied,

full streams ahead.

b

Suddenly, Lake Erie appears

as an ocean cradling its own light.

My fingers loosen grip, a seashell falls—

Home.

Originally published in The Tower Magazine, UK

b

Somewhere Between Heaven and the Heron 

The call of the running tide is clear,
a wild call that cannot be denied
—John Mansfield

There’s something to be said

about the wind waving in the ocean

rinsing shells that nag the traveler

upset by cell phones wailing,

sea gulls screeching, or men

shearing leaves at dawn.

b

Quartz sand blows across his face,

the slight sting reminds of breath

where sea salt drips to nourish sand,

black-eyed Susans, sea oats,

and a few Palmetto palms.

b

Somewhere between heaven

and the heron there is a song.

b

Eternity Meets the World’s Beginning

He departs as swift as his arrival, our minutes a fond memory. A gift. Return tomorrow, egret, I’ll serve a fresh plate of beef Wellington next to the shells. We’ll speak of the past, herald desires to the sky and wink with a smile.

Like a poem, his plumage flows in wind, spiral tufts crowning head. Toes stretch into still-wings. I wrestle the urge to stroke his down, hunted years past almost to extinction for feathery hats. Today, we share this space, this air. This pure-white charmer preens like a tightrope walker balancing on a toothpick. Bright yellow-basket feet, one tucks suspended from sight. His head nestles into the soft pillow of his back, ever-present, watching every move.

I sneak Mother-May-I steps into hotel room for a Canon camera. He inches toward the door concentric eyes zoom onto a plate of empty shells cleansed of salt drying in never-fading brilliance. Quickly, I close the door and snap 100 snowy egret photos.

Within a wink the white moon perches on the rail overlooking beach gulf sand where eternity meets the world’s beginning.

I am.

The Gulf Between Us

His plumage wades through black seas:
tufted crown still wings, toothpick legs
glaze mordant red. His beak stabs my gut.

I turn off the news.

Creatures great and small
covered in the doom and sludge
of sleep. He swallows
tar balls thinking food.

—Clarissa Jakobsons, Aurora, Ohio, teaches art and writing courses at a local community college. Her art has been exhibited widely. Recently she enjoyed a Fine Arts Work Center artist residency and is working on a book of poems. Visiting Cape Cod during her college years instilled in Jakobsons a love for the ocean though without her quite knowing why it felt like home. When her daughters visited Lithuania of her childhood and sent photos of the Baltic dunes, she immediately understood the connection—the sea harbors a special place in her DNA; it is why she curls toes in the sand.

Mennonite poet, Poetry

The Unmapped Way, by David L. Myers

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KingsviewCoGuestPostBarnGreen

The Unmapped Way

An early Tuesday,
Late September morning
And the clouded light
Lines the closed slats
Of the window blinds.
Muted shapes
Of sofa and chairs
And last night’s
Wine glass on the
Coffee table silhouette
The room. Soon enough
There will be fillamented
Incandescence
And humming steel.
But for now
There is only this
Silent habitation
From whence cometh,
Finally,
A turning toward surrender,
A calming in holy defeat,
And gratitude for
Once again being on
The beautiful,
The unmapped way.

—David L. Myers has been a pastor of four Mennonite congregations and worked in a variety of denominational leadership settings. Currently he serves in the Obama administration, having been appointed by the president in May 2009 to direct the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2011, he was also named as senior advisor to the FEMA administrator. During autumn 2015 he is Practitioner in Residence at Eastern Mennonite University.

Mennonite poet, Poetry

Being Saved, by Barbara Esch Shisler

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KCGuestPost-BarbaraShisler

Being Saved

An old man
crouches in a November rain
calling a little dog.

From the dark cage in a puppy mill
to the universe of a fenced yard,
she runs wild, drenched and trembling,
desperate for what she doesn’t know.

His sciatica aches.
He chases, pleads, swears, plots.
He stays with her through
the cold afternoon,

until help comes and she is caught,
carried, wrapped, warmed,
held fast—
home.

—Barbara Esch Shisler, author of the Kingsview & Co post “Imagining God’s Imagination,” is a retired Mennonite pastor and spiritual director, active in her Perkasie Mennonite congregation. Her life as wife, mother, and grandmother is filled with friends, gardening, dogs, movies, books and much more. Reading and writing poetry have been a lifelong joy and learning. She is author of the collection of poems Momentary Stay (Cascadia/DreamSeeker Books, 2015) from which “Being Saved” is drawn by permission.

Editor’s note: As Pope Francis electrifies many with his vision of mercy and compassion for all humans and creatures and earth itself, I see Barbara Shisler’s “Being Saved” as naming honestly the chasing, pleading, swearing it can take—even as she opens our hearts to the tenderness of being carried home by God and each other the Pope is inviting.