A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith
Dappled Things
King Alfred
Alas! O prince, once worthy Glamis,
What have you done? Alas!
That bold ambitious blade has murdered
So much more than man.
Trust not the eyes!
For Sun is gone and Moon is dead,
And Nature trembles from the shock,
Hart rebels and hunts the hound,
And sky expels the hawk.
Trust not the heart!
For dark deeds and darker thoughts
Rise and set within Macbeth,
And Nature and the Soul are set
Upon the glamorous road to Death. [Read more…]
Dappled Things
Mikaela D’Eigh
I left behind
My quills and scrolls
And tapestries of yore
To find their tale
Lived true and strong
By tested heart and pure. [Read more…]
Dappled Things
J.B. Toner
Well, answer me, for God’s love, Christ, speak up—
Explain Your perfect Paradise to me,
Where Clare and Francis sup (quite possibly)
With those who poison your once-sacred cup:
With rapists, killers, child-molesting priests,
Where Stalin (maybe, through Your holy grace)
Meets tortured gulag inmates face to face
And sings hosannahs at the endless feast!
Yes, You forgive us, Lord, I know that part—
But we’re just human, Jesus, You forget,
So how can we forgive what we have done?
— Oh, wait. . . Your human mother’s human heart
Was pierced by me, and each of us, and yet
She loves me still, the killer of her Son.
Dappled Things
J.B. Toner
The sun! A million bird-hymns split the skies,
His crimson halo sanctifies the peaks,
Flings green on grass and blue on babbling creeks,
The violets open dew-bespangled eyes,
The shadows spring away in swift surprise,
Bright clouds rush outwards, galleons white and sleek,
A merry day his golden beams bespeak,
And azure oriflammes proclaim his rise. [Read more...]
Dappled Things
Clay Reherman
To many, the phrase “hard times in America” brings to mind stark images of the 1930s: Ecological and economic disaster, powerful storms following close upon one another, high crime, starvation, despair, societal depression in every imaginable degree and mode. We may thank Mr. Steinbeck for this mental association: His painting of the “dust bowl days” in The Grapes of Wrath has imbued three generations with a notion of what it’s like when a nation is visited by the Angel of Death.
1934
Most Americans in those days had an idea that a sentence of doom could be carried out from above, below, or somewhere. While the 1920s had been exceedingly prosperous and “liberating” to most classes of people, there was still an honest fear of God left in this country: Like a thief in the night, the Angel of Death snuck up on folks, and even a proud craftsman like Garv Atwood could be left holding the bag.
[Read more…]
Dappled Things
Michael Baruzzini
You have heard it said: “Do not let schooling interfere with your education.” But I say unto you, that it is not what is within a man that makes him good, but rather what he displays without. You are like antique books: inside, full of wisdom, but outside having nothing to make us look at you. For what does it profit a man if he hath wisdom and knowledge, but hath not credentials? Therefore, I say unto you: Seek to earn credit, and do not pursue unlucrative learning. For as the résumé says, so surely the heart of a man is also.
Dappled Things
Joy Wambeke
“For the poor souls in purgatory,” I heard my father mutter through clenched teeth. Through the shadows of the upstairs hallway, I could often see my father in my parents’ darkened room, his hands wound around his foot or grasping his knee. He always got ready for work at Sydney harbor in the dark so as not to wake mum. It was his habit to offer the inevitable bumps into furniture for the dead not yet in heaven.
It would be fair to say that mum and my father believed in God. [Read more…]
Dappled Things
Mela Kirkpatrick
When it quits working, seal the jar tightly and store in a dark place.
The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery
Swing low, sweet chariot the gushes of juice, slurping between our fists sunk in hundreds of purple-red grapes,
Dappled Things
Matthew Crane
There is an oblong thing.
Its white by candle yellow.
Inside, unseen innards
can goosh and grow and mix
a dash life- color, and down
in sticky strands to fluff
and feather flower forth,
a chicken, not an omelet [Read more…]
Matthew Alderman
Matthew Alderman
The glacial white paint comes peeling away
From the monumental doorframe,
Peeling away in great strips like some fabulous
Undiagnosed disease:
And the columns all around are cold and mottled,
Pale and dead and grey.
I stand at the grate,
Looking in through holy prison-bars
Rich with swirling ironwork arabesques
Moorish Palermo turned baroque. [Read more…]
