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) .
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) .
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it’s the ocean’s rhythmic tug
that helps me sleep, my body’s own
surge remembering its deepest pulse.
Think of those Celtic monks who
scaled the slippery rocks carrying
vellum and inks while the sea broke
and battered beneath them. High
in a crevice, a hidden stone hut
with cot and candle. The scribe
dips and swirls his quill to preserve
the story—Luke’s genealogy,
name after name, letters shaped
like birds in every color, a flight
of messengers released into history.
Each word unfurls the promise,
like Gabriel kneeling. The body
knows that wings, like waves,
can break through walls and enter,
that the secret of the story
is love, that even as we sleep,
its tides carry us in a wild safety.
—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, from which this poem is excerpted (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2015, used by permission of publisher and author).
Editor’s note: Kingsview & Co guest posts will often not be intended to integrate directly with the flow of prior and future posts, and certainly this haunting poem can stand alone in its telling of the story’s secret. However, it’s also offered here in awareness that it joins the flow of “Blogging Toward Kansas City 2015” and the yearnings of so many of us, amid tumult in church and culture, to experience “that the secret of the story / is love, that even as we sleep, / its tides carry us in a wild safety.”
The knots in the homemade comforter
Feel like prayers trying to keep the
Hardness of the cold wooden floor
From seeping further into my back
Tonight the house is full of pain, past
Abuse, death, violence, terror—
Beds and sofas are full of guests
But there is floor space, and a comforter
The true comforter, however, is not under my
Back but in the room next door—
Abused, raped, threatened, desperate she
Pled for asylum for ten months
Her midnight songs and prayers opened doors
And now shake the earth in my heart
Rattling my complacence and false
Comfort on a hard wooden floor
—Jonathan Beachy, San Antonio, Texas, has spent a life time caring for and being enriched by persons society often rejects. Currently those persons are special needs students, but historically they have also included prison inmates, and indigenous persons in South America. Volunteering with Interfaith Welcome Coalition has allowed Beachy to see the face of Jesus over and over in the faces of refugee women and children crying out for help, for “caring for one of the least of these, is caring for me” (Jesus).
*Interfaith Welcome Coalition. IWC is a response and presence for refugee women and children who have fled unspeakable horrors in their Central American countries of origin. On their arrival at the Unites States border, they turn themselves in, requesting help. Their “crime” is to have requested help, and so they are detained in for-profit prisons (euphemistically called “Family Detention Centers”) until they can meet bond or are granted asylum.
Editor’s note: I want to thank Jonathan Beachy for being a catalyst for the launching of Kingsview & Co. His asking about venues for publishing poetry like this helped me decide it was time to extend DreamSeeker Magazine, which often published poetry, through this new blog. In light of this, I’m particularly pleased that Jonathan’s is the very first guest post. —Michael A. King
