Guest poet: Father Ryan T. Sliwa

"Everywhere the green / flush of impending harvest..."

photo by the author

Rogation	


     By night, after a long day, 
at the kitchen table
          with an ersatz supper. 

     The mind shuffles the deck	
of unnamable griefs. 

     I look up—
the herbs in the brown pot
          are reaching for the windows.  






Four Tanka for Summer


     i

Elbows upon the
wooden table. An airplane, 
some distant traffic.
And my heartbeat jostling 
the water in the bright glass. 


     ii

( for J. )   

This frantic hissing 
of tires on rain-soaked streets
and the flying mist 
tell another narrative: 
a slow rising from our drought.


      iii

The air turned over
and flipped the leaves on their sides 
at the seam of day: 
a new light, and the relief 
from the choking August heat.


     iv

Everywhere the green 
flush of impending harvest
along the floodplain. 
By night, the cricket song re-
cedes beyond our firelight.

Ryan T. Sliwa is a parish priest and Benedictine oblate. He lives in rural Massachusetts. A few of his poems have been published in places like Ekstasis and Presence, and he is forthcoming in New Verse Review. Big Wheel Press will print a chapbook of his poems for private circulation this summer. Father Sliwa is also the author of a small book of sermons and meditations, New Nazareths In Us, from Cenacle Press.