May 13, 2009 / Creative Writing
I watched Rebel Without a Cause on TV late one college night when I learned …
No, no music but the heave
of your heart as you trudge
on this cracked pavement
of a path that is your past
and future, the healing blisters
better than the gashed
memories that drip-drip-drip
Hansel-and-Gretel style
along this asphalt of survival,
which is some hope, yes,
that one-foot-in-front-of-the-other
platitude the real work of the living.
A road is a road is a road
leading somewhere not here
while each toe and heel dream
the unreal threshold: cool grasses,
still waters, glorious gates
of beautifully broken pearls.
About the Author
Marjorie Maddox
Marjorie Maddox is a professor of English at Lock Haven University and an assistant editor at Presence. She has published eleven collections of poetry, including True, False, None of the Above, which was published in the Poiema Poetry Series and was an Illumination Book Award Medalist; Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, which won the Yellowglen Prize; and Perpendicular As I, which won the Sandstone Book Award. She also published the short story collection What She Was Saying, four children’s books, a contemporary poetry anthology, and over 550 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com. The cover image for this poem, Asphalt Heart, is used with permission by the photographer and activist Karen Elias.
Susan Lilley
May 13, 2009 / Creative Writing
May 13, 2009 / Creative Writing
Mary Van Denend
May 3, 2011 / Creative Writing
May 3, 2011 / Creative Writing
Mary Van Denend reflects on Simone Weil’s “Waiting for God,” a seminal piece on Weil’s understandings of grace, affliction, and our “sacred longing” for God.