Guest poet: Fr. Ryan T. Sliwa
"Winter Quarters"
Winter Quarters Not far from an old battlefield. What snows have made the world so cold and heavy This year! The yards are desolate, the orchards Skeletal and shivering. And the clipped corn stalks Jut from the snowpack around empty silos. Neglect comes on like hypothermia. We freeze and atrophy, one by one, And insulate and harm without intending. What vernal blood will warm us? What paschal moon will wake the frogs and songbirds? What thaw will pull the giving rain into the soil? Forbearance now. To be alive enough to take The deprivations. To note the barn across the way With its pair of southern doors left wide open.
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 printed a chapbook of his poems, Session, for private circulation last summer. Fr. Sliwa is also the author of a small book of sermons and meditations, New Nazareths In Us, from Cenacle Press.
Lovely. Thank you, Joseph!
... to be alive enough to take the deprivation...
Wonderful.