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Sarah Rossiter

Sarah Rossiter is a writer and spiritual director in Concord, Massachusetts.

Poetry

Pietà

He was the last to enter the small plane, a tall man, ducking through the narrow door, carrying a slight form hidden beneath a cotton sheet, motionless ...
Poetry

Snowdrops

In bitter cold, the grieving wait for what might rise from shattered ground: beneath the rubble, something stirs, a baby, newborn, cord attached, ...
Poetry

The Dead

Today the dead speak, friends, relatives— I am older now, there are so many— strangers too, Rumi, Mary Magdalene, Jesus, those I have never met but know. ...
Poetry

Marguerite Porete

(author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, died June 1, 1310)
Poetry

Clearing

What is this need to clear the hill, to sever saplings, one by one dragged to the withered bracken by the load; not birches though, but oaks...
Poetry

Reunion

The crush of bodies, bow ties, suits, sleek smiling women dressed in silk, the din of small talk drowning thought, and all I yearn for is escape but where...
Poetry

On spending the morning filling my fountain pen

Of course it doesn’t take all morning but it could, sitting by the river, hoping to capture the day on paper as the cartridge draws slowly, and water sings, and trees...
Poetry

Vernal pool

Here nothing moves, the water waiting, still as glass, amid the cattails’ silent stalks while over there across the sea, fire shreds the sky, exploding as...
Poetry

White pelicans

One early spring in Illinois, startled by the foreign sight of pelicans upon dark water, we stopped to stare, my mother and I, at such ungainly awkward...
Poetry

Feather on the breath of God

“The feather flew, not because of anything   in itself but because the air bore it along.”...

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Poetry

Puzzles

It’s a question of control, or should I say the lack of it in this fractured fear-filled world that draws me each free afternoon to focus on a wooden puzzle, solid, tactile,...
Poetry

Samia

She was five when her mother left her At the movies with her baby brother and Never returned which could have been The end of the story though it’s not—...
Poetry

Sin eater

She enters the cottage to find The corpse laid out for burial, The family waiting for her to eat The fresh-baked bread placed On the body....
Poetry

Fireflies

It was midnight when we saw them, such unexpected bright abundance, we thought at first we must be dreaming, the night itself lit from within as if...
Poetry

The wren’s lament

Who knows why the fledglings died— slowly—lingering even now in the nest built in the clothespin bag hanging from a nail on the porch while the frantic...
Poetry

The pond

Around the edge lace filigree shatters at the slightest touch, shards scattering like broken glass, but farther out the ice is thick, immobilized by Arctic cold,...

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