The Saints of April

Today's featured poem on "The Writer's Almanac."

I think it's beautiful.

The Saints of April

by Todd Davis

Coltsfoot gives way to dandelion,
plum to apple blossom. Cherry fills
our woods, white petals melting
like the last late snow. Dogwood's
stigmata shine with the blood
of this season. How holy
forsythia and redbud are
as they consume their own
flowers, green leaves running
down their crowns. Here is
the shapeliness of bodies
newly formed, the rich cloth
that covers frail bones and hides
roots that hold fervently
to this dark earth.

A Poem

In my introductory creative writing course, we've been spending these first few weeks focusing on poetry - reading and writing lots of poetry. This is one of the more recent ones of mine: a political poem. Before I go into too much explanation, I'll let you read it:

"Shadows"

A woman who wore a checkered shirt now has checkered skin,

branded by the heat.

Corpses unclaimed, unidentifiable; faces burned, clothes burned, skin burned black.

A mountain of hollow skulls, the remains of those killed, too numerous to bury properly.

Everything is burned. The ground, the rubble, the sky - all black with ash and smoke,

as if nothing will ever look the same again,

as if nothing will ever be bright and alive again.

Everything is melted, leveled, piled up in smoking heaps of debris and body parts.

That corpse was a person once.

Did they love someone? Did they have children?

They are burned for the crimes of those with more power, more threat, like an offering.

A sacrifice.

Closest to the blast, there are no remains at all.

But on a bridge, there are two discolored patches.

Shadows.

Shadows of people who were standing right there, and now . . .

only shadows. Their ghosts, eternally embedded in the concrete.

Maybe they were the lucky ones. Maybe they didn't feel it.

At least there is a record that they were there.

That they existed.

That there was a time when they were real, and alive.

No one knows their names, or what their voices sounded like.

But there is proof.

They were right there.

I originally wanted this to be a prose poem, but Jordan pointed out to me that prose poems aren't supposed to have line breaks, so I'm not really sure what it is. I tried to use the line breaks for dramatic affect.

Thoughts?

Where Is God?

A poem I wrote last semester, partially inspired by a piano piece I had been working on (from Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words) and a book I had been reading (On God and Christ by St. Gregory of Nazianzus). Originally published on Facebook, March 10, 2009.
*****
Where is God?
In the wind that laces through my fingers
And whispers in the trees -
Their furtive murmurings that speak
Of subtle mysteries.

Where is God?
With the sun that gently warms my skin
And floods the earth with light -
And by His word, relents its heat
For coolness of the night.

Where is God?
In the harmonies of well-tuned strings
And hymnals of the birds -
The choirs of creation praise
With songs that have no words.

Where is God?
Within the fibers of my heart
From whence He urges me -
'Tis better to remember Him
Than 'tis for me to breathe.

©
*****
Reading it through again, I can see in my memory, quite clearly, the different things that inspired various parts of the poem. I was sitting under two tall trees, watching and listening to birds singing. I was walking to class from my dorm, in the bright afternoon sunlight, gently moving my arm, hand and fingers in the breeze. I still have that piano piece memorized; I love it. And I love learning, reading and thinking about God, and how He is present in every part of my life in very deep, very real ways.