BEHOLD THE MAN! WINNING POEMS

Announcing our First Poetry Contest Winners

Wayfare magazine congratulates the inaugural winners of “Behold the Man!,” our annual contest for poems about or related to Jesus of Nazareth.

This year’s judge was James Matthew Wilson, the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas.

Sally Thomas

Luminous Mystery

A man came walking up and down the world. 
Another man, in camel’s hair and leather,
With honey on his lips, cried out, Prepare. 
The river flowed between its banks. The weather,
Unsettled, threatened thunder. One dove hurled
Itself out of the sky. Those who were there
Have testified. The first man went somewhere
To hide. The fuss died down for weeks. But when 
Reports at last began to circulate—
Along the coast, a rash of fishermen
Walked off the job, and on a Saturday
Someone who’d had a demon lost it—Fate
Will out, they said. In spring, the scent went cold. 

*
Again this Holy Week, the scent’s gone cold. 
Beneath the grass, the dead grow ever old.
We’re left to witness how the evening light
Flames low on the horizon. In the night,
A feast consumed is something else again:
Sharp fire and darkness, aftertaste of wine
And sleep, metallic in the mouth. The trees
Have wreathed themselves in white beneath low skies
That gather for a storm. Each year the same. 
All time’s a Caesar’s penny with his name, 
His face stamped on in profile, ever turning
Toward this world that makes a work of burning
Itself to ash. Each day’s a judgment day. 
Thy kingdom come, he teaches us to say.

James Matthew Wilson’s comment on “Luminous Mystery”:
This double sonnet begins with a recounting of the Gospel narrative reduced to the simple sentence structures of a primitive chronicle. The effect is to make the story of our salvation strange to us. The man who walked up and down the world goes to “hide.” One Saturday, fishermen walk off the job. The initial effect is not entirely pleasant; the paratactic sentence structures speak in defiance of the music the pentameter lines would otherwise allow to rise and at times risk a mere awkwardness on the ear. But not only is this first part interesting in itself, and not only does its method of narration almost acquit its deliberate style, it leaves us totally unprepared—in the best sense—for the sonnet to follow that draws us into the fluent sentences of a subjectivity at prayer, one that speaks with understanding, indeed a fell understanding, that sees history for what it is: “All time’s a Caesar’s penny with his name.” Here, the sonnet’s rhymes brought to the tight proximity of couplets, the poem holds forth with music and wisdom.

Luca D'Anselmi

Co-Redemptrix

After the murder, when he fled the pope,
the painter hid in Valmontone where
he paid for wine by frescoing the church
burned later when the allies marched on Rome:
Santa Maria delle Grazie.
The frescoes now survive in photographs.
In one, Mary turns her face away
from where her son lies stretched out on the ground,
unraised and only partly crucified.
The executioners have fled the scene,
too frightened by the darkness in the sky
to finish what they’ve only just begun.
She groans for Abraham’s pure confidence
to swing the blade above his only son—
a father’s final fiat not to quail.
No ram yet in a thicket, just the rocks.
No one but her to finish what’s begun.
She looks down at the hammer and the nails.

Sally Thomas

Innlight

They met him on the road, in kicked-up dust. 
The hour waned as yesterday’s had done.  
They urged him to break bread, as travelers must, 
Though he’d made a pretense of going on 
Past nightfall. All three stopped to wash their feet. 
Three windows dropped their brightness on the street. 
 
The hour waned as yesterday’s had done,
Clear, blue, and cool. Three shadows wavered, long,
Behind them in the dust. The westering sun
Slipped down. The wind that met them smelled of strong
Sharp cedar smoke. Pricked out in chilly beauty,  
The first star glimmered. Conscious of a duty,  

They urged him to break bread, as travelers must 
When thrown together. At the door, they said, 
He stripped and bent to rinse the film of dust 
From their feet, then his own. The dead lay dead—  
A stranger’s graceful gesture, that was all.  
Three sets of wet footprints went down the hall.  

Though he’d made a pretense of going on, 
He let the two beguile him with their talk  
Of road’s-end ease, of fire and bread and wine 
And company well met. He let them walk  
Him through the low doorway, seat him at table.  
New lambs were crying in a distant stable. 
 
Past nightfall, all three stopped to wash their feet, 
In smells of sweat and baking bread and barnyard, 
Most welcome smells, fermented, homely, sweet 
To wanderers in the world. The inn-wife barred 
Her door against the dark. No room tonight  
For idlers. They laughed. She struck a light. 
 
Three windows dropped their brightness on the street.  
Inside, the table set with bread and wine  
Awaited them, with dates and roasted meat  
And olives polished by the firelight’s shine.
The sharp smoke rose in strands. The dead lay dead. 
They knew that now. The new man broke the bread.   

Laura Schaffer

Pieta

How well can marble say what it was like 
to hold her son that final day, beneath 
the knocked-together tree now seared to sign?
His body gone a mute, ungainly thing,
how much of memory could she have begged  
back from its weight, its sense of fallen-from? 
What burden death his body must have been. 

We find her there in labored stillness, left 
to bear what there was left to bear of this,
her lap composed as if to suffer it, 
the very word and its refusing form.

Here were the frame and surfaces of him, 
the ribs all sunk to such a blankness that 
the world was bled the very slack of death
within the prayer of holding him once more.
The world. And yet in moment marble, here, 
she breathed, the word is speaking truth and bone. 
Unbroken word that was, that is, will stay, 
would raise at last the third and unlost day. 

Elijah Perseus Blumov

The Flaming Rose of Chartres

On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the opaline colors of heaven.
– Henry Adams

Red diamond, quatrefoil, prophet and king
caught in the flaming glass where angels sing: 
Hell is the overflow of Heaven’s glory.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri.

Marie enthroned can hear her baby crying,
each sob a nail– she sees her baby dying, 
but she must serve her part within the story.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri.

Imprismed in the light, lily and dove
sparkle within a bloodstained jewel of love,
its facets strange and glistening and gory.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri. 

O thorn-encrusted, bright, tear-spangled rose,
let me not burn, but learn what Heaven knows:
joy is the gem, and suffering the quarry.
Daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri. 

Elijah Perseus Blumov

Annunciation

Please. I love you. Do not turn from me. 
No, you will not believe. But I must speak,
and would not speak if it was not the truth.
I ask for no belief. Only your faith.
I woke in darkness, burning in my belly.
I tumbled out of bed, nearly convulsing,
and crawled along the floor to find a lamp.
I found none, and the fire only worsened,
as if the sun itself blazed deep inside me. 
My only thought was water. Reach the well. 
The moon was full, so she could guide my way,
and since I’m yours, no man would dare to touch me. 
My hands shook– they could hardly work the latch.
But, somehow, I collapsed and pushed it open.
And then, I saw it: dazzling in the moonglare, 
it seemed at first to be a towering shadow,
the moon beyond its head forming a halo. 
But then, I saw it truly. And such fright
consumed me that I found I couldn’t scream. 
Yosef. It was a moth. A monstrous moth.
Its shining fleece as long as any lamb’s,
each eye a thousand eyes, and on its wings–
relentlessly white wings– more golden eyes,
and on its head, antennae to the stars. 
It looked at me. Six arms stretched down to me. 
Then, suddenly, my fear became deep peace. 
It had no mouth, but still it seemed to speak,
I know not how, but in my very bones: 
Shalom, Miriam, it seemed to say. 
And darling, at that moment, scalding pain 
became the utmost pleasure: warm and molten,
trickling from my guts into my loins.
I cried and cried. Yosef, it felt so good.
I would not tell you this, but it is true. 
I fainted, and I woke up here with you. 
Days after that was when I showed the signs. 
If now you want to leave, I understand.
But do not hate me. Please, you must not hate me. 
Forgive me. Be his father. Take my hand.