Dead leafless claws of winter branches
frozen against the starting sky, the newborn light
pink growing, somehow growing, toward red and life.
The branches cold-preserved, unmoving, limbs not
as animals in formalin-bloated jars but
as the incorruptible saint’s body:
flawed and too unsettling,
posed in death, alive by clay,
too obscene for any word but prayer.
Andrew J. Calis is a poet, teacher, and husband, and an overjoyed father of four. His first book of poetry, Pilgrimages (Wipf & Stock, 2020), was praised by James Matthew Wilson for having “the intensity of Hopkins” and for “layer[ing] light on light in hopes of helping us to see.” His work has appeared in America: The Jesuit Review, Dappled Things, Presence, Convivium and elsewhere and he teaches at Archbishop Spalding High School in Maryland.
