Lent/Easter 2008

The New Jerusalem

Dappled Things

John Heard

Will you live; will you live in the physical world? With the sun setting low and the shadows unfurled? Can you live with the way they make you look un-real?

– “The Taming of the Hands that Came Back to Life,” Sunset Rubdown

There must be a place where modernity is as nothing. A place that is not a philosophy department, say at some university, where a majority of professors think the modern project is either implausible or else exhausted. That is, the place cannot be post-modern in the usual, theory-inflected sense of that term. [Read more…]

Prayer

Dappled Things

John A. Di Camillo

Peace.
Sacred silence settles on the soul.
The heart’s thin veil is gently lifted.
Her eyes, in looking out, see in.
Distortion, distraction, delusion:
Cut down by serenity’s blade,
Crimson clarity.

Life courses swiftly, silent and steady,
Unseen but softly felt,
Until now, exposed, shines bright and crimson, crimson.

[Read more…]

The Crown of Red

Dappled Things

Amanda Glass

For Max on his saint’s day

I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.
– Saint Maximilian Kolbe

When stalking death just brushed his sleeve,
intent upon another man,
he saw a proffered gift instead--
   a gift prepared for him alone
   in depths before the world was known--
and snatched it up with joyful haste.

[Read more…]

Ice Wine

Dappled Things

Gabriel Olearnik

And a dark-eyed woman in the old country
dreams of him for one of the world’s ready men
with a pair of fresh lips
and a kiss better than all the wild grapes
that ever grew in Tuscany. [Read more…]

April Error

Dappled Things

Sr. Mary Catherine Vukmanic, OSU

A robin sang “April.”
My heart did the same,
And a calendar hailed
The month of that name.

But nature, distracted,
Mismanaged things so;
She sent with the springtime
Not flower, but snow.

[Read more…]

Enlightenment

Dappled Things

Richard J. Rodriguez

Sed sicut scriptum est quod oculus non vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascendit quae praeparavit Deus his qui diligunt illum.

– 1 Corinthians 2:9

Reveille, Reveille!
The heralds of eternal daylight
Flip off circuit breakers, flooding
Forth electric erudition, shocking
Suns into the skies, slinging
Melancholic moons beneath the earth:
Aeterna lux, clamantis vox,
A far cry ringing newly
Out across capacious plains. [Read more…]

New Love in Spring

Dappled Things

Sr. Mary Catherine Vukmanic, OSU

When winter came, I welcomed snow
Nor minded much that summers go,
Too glad that—though their breath is cold—
The years are white when they are old.

But now that spring has come again,
I am in love with April rain
And budding things, and happy, too,
That years are green when they are new.
[Read more…]

A Grief Sublime

Dappled Things

Leah Acosta

Fecundity of grief
can sow the arsenic seeds of bitterness
or bear the sweeter fruits of peace, relief—
so civilized a crop from wilderness.
A time to plant, a time to reap, a time
to laugh, a time to weep. A grief sublime.

Lealani Mae (Leah) Acosta is a first-year neurology resident at the University of Virginia Health System.

Seek MySpace

Dappled Things

John Murphy

I first heard about Facebook in my university’s computer lab. I was plugging away at a final paper for Nomadic Art of Eurasia when I happened to overhear a conversation between two girls sitting behind me. Actually, there was very little happenstance about it. You see, I’d harbored a mild crush on one of them since freshman year, but in typical wallflower fashion had never done more than cast moon-eyed looks across the classroom. [Read more…]

The Letter of Magdalen Montague, Part IV: The Disciple

Dappled Things

Eleanor Bourg Donlon

11 July 1914
St. Mary’s College, S–

Dear R.,

I recently encountered a face from our joint past–a young earl and eager profligate, though not so young as formerly and certainly more inclined to high-minded pomposity. He obligingly provided me with your address. Although I remember well your abhorrence of all things resembling sentimentality, I own that I have thought of you often in the passing years. I shall venture into even more objectionable territory when I assert furthermore that I remember you daily in my prayers. I hope you are well and have remained safe in these anxious times. [Read more…]