I carry my failure with me. My embarrassment. My shame. It grows. It sets me apart from men in my life, the hard man with the violin, the thin man with the flask. See them in the photo. They have enough, more than enough. If one day they leave a little, the next they put less on their plate. My life? Apparently, the sustaining belief is this: never enough. Never enough sweetness. Never enough love. Never enough, so I surround... Read more
Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. This poem is crafted as a conversation: among an unspecified “they,” an unspecified “we,” and God. The “we” is skeptical about the good actions traditionally attributed to God. (“From nothing God made everything, they said. / Nothing plus God is nothing we said.”) The “we” presumes humankind’s self-sufficiency: even though we are “honeyed self-interest,” “when something goes... Read more
By Laura Bramon The summer before you died, I hid on the roof in Tollygunge. I walked part of the way home from Sudder Street and by the time I got to the apartment building where I was staying, the sooty red sunset had spent itself. Dusk sifted in the quarter’s dim air, and from the park by the main road a wedding feast’s smoke, incense, and music rose up from beneath a red lit tent. I had lost my... Read more
This summer, I climbed the rotting steps to the hayloft of my family’s barn to look for a plaque honoring the use of emergent DNA technology in solving the Brown’s Chicken Massacre case. The floor was soft, dipping a little as I walked, and I looked in slow motion through my great-aunt’s things: frosted glassware, ceramic roosters, romance novels, and Bible after Swedish Bible. The plaque hung in my great-aunt’s home after her daughter, Barbara, received it from the Chicago... Read more
By Ann Hedreen I drape a towel over Nick’s head and strap it in place with a bandana. I squeeze Claire’s arms into her bent-hanger angel wings. It is the morning of the Christmas pageant, and my shepherd and my angel are ready to go. The question is: Am I? Because on this pageant morning, I don’t get to walk in to church with my scrappy, adorable children. Instead, I’ll be making an entrance at the last minute, with my... Read more
Recently, I spent a good part of three weeks promoting an event that my parish was sponsoring: sending out email blasts, networking, posting the event on Facebook. I’m on the committee that arranged the event, and I volunteered to do the advertising. As I did this tedious task, I tried to remind myself: Every moment is lived in God’s love. Somehow these moments are God’s moments. “I keep sensing…that the whole world is every moment saying the name of God,”... Read more
Dearest Cal: Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I’ve been re-reading Emerson) for several days. — Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, July 27, 1960 Dearest Elizabeth: I think of you daily and feel anxious lest we lose our old backward and forward flow that always seems to open me up and bring color and peace. — Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 10, 1963 My office bookshelves are segregated topically,... Read more
I’m doing most of my walking after dark these days as night comes a little earlier. Night walking always makes me feel lighter, almost weightless, so it seems like I’m walking faster than I do in daylight, and since the scenery no longer differentiates one day’s walk from another, my thoughts are in a tunnel. I’m ageless and united in memory and feeling with almost every dark walk I’ve ever taken. Tonight that weightless feeling, which somehow never blesses me... Read more
I am outdoors in the late afternoon and sitting cross-legged on a quilt from which I can view the garden. This spot, under the shade of a large sugar maple—the setting idyllic and agrarian—should be perfect for quiet prayer. But it’s not. I think I am emerging from the haze of an anxiety that caught hold of me when my baby was three months old: panic attacks and mind-spiraling fears that left me feeling unbalanced and overwhelmed. As the primary... Read more
Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. I love William Wenthe’s “George Herbert on the Road to Salisbury” for many reasons. It is, of course, a tribute from a contemporary poet to one of the greatest poets in the English language—the seventeenth century “Metaphysical” poet who was also an Anglican pastor, as Wikipedia puts it, “of the small rural parish of Fugglestone St. Peter with Bemerton,... Read more
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