Authors /
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is poet laureate of Arkansas. Her most recent collection is Flying Yellow (Paraclete).
An Indulgence
It is impossible that the son of these tears should perish. —St. Monica, mother of Augustine of Hippo...
I visit his grave on Christmas
and trade mums for a white poinsettia. The earth has sunk, level now as unleavened bread of communion, no longer a mound,...
Prayer Shawl
The work of a prayer shawl
is to love the weight it holds,
the blue yarns heavy with the ache
of shoulders, of cold like winter rain,...
Traveling light
I caught the gleam of her silver bracelet
as she stroked her son’s back in church
that Sunday the missionary came.
The gesture invited a burst of sunlight...
A theme perhaps for the plague
It’s the memory of your harmonies and the grim house
lifting in your ebullience that I’m holding against
this deadly fugue, the flight from everything and nothing...
Gray distances
The loneliness of their long whistles,
the sound full of their whiteness,
even in community they are lonely,
miles of loneliness across the rain-...
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