Walt McDonald*

Walt McDonald (1934—2022) is a former United States Air Force pilot, who served in Viet Nam, and taught at the Air Force Academy. He was Professor of English Emeritus at Texas Tech University, teaching there for thirty years; and was Poet Laureate of Texas. He also served as Poet Laureate of Lubbock.

He authored 23 poetry books, including Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989), and Counting Survivors (Pittsburgh, 1995). According to his obituary, “Giving church talks on God's grace and love was his favorite work.” He and his wife were long-time members of the Broadway Church of Christ, in Lubbock, Texas.

The Essential Walt McDonald (Texas Tech University Press), appeared a few months after his death. The following poem is from Faith Is a Radical Master (Abilene Christian University Press 2005).

Faith Is a Radical Master

God bats on the side of the scrubs.
With a clean-up hitter like that, who needs
to worry aboutstealing home, a double squeeze,
cleat-pounding triples? If nothing else works,

take a walk, lean into the wicked pitch
careening inside at ninety miles an hour.
At bat, just get on base and pray the next nerd
doesn’t pop up. When someone’s already on, the coach

never calls me Mr. October, seldom signals Hit away.
If Johnson with the wicked curve owns the strike zone
or the ump, I’ll bunt. No crack of the bat,
no wildly cheered Bambino everyone loves.

Lay it down the line like the weakest kid in school,
disciple of the sacrifice. Some hour my time will come,
late in the game, and I’m on third, wheezing from the run
from first after a wild pitch, and Crazy Elmore

waving like a windmill by the third-base line.
Hands on my knees, I’ll watch the pitcher
lick two fingers, wipe them on his fancy pin stripes
and try to stare me dead. I’ll be almost dead,

gasping, wondering how I’ll wobble home if someone bunts
or dribbles a slow roller and the coach yells
Go! But there, there in the box is God,
who doesn’t pound home plate like an earthquake

but slowly points the bat like the Babe toward center field,
and all my family in the clouds go wild, all friends
I’ve loved and lost, even the four-eyed scrubs
In the dugout slugging each other and laughing,

tossing their gloves like wild hosannas, and why not –
it’s bottom of the ninth, two outs, a run behind
and a hall-of-fame fast baller on the mound,
but I’m on third and leaning home, and look who’s up.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Walt McDonald: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

George David Clark

George David Clark, born and raised in the South, is an associate professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. He is also editor-in-chief at 32 Poems. His first poetry collection Reveille (Arkansas, 2015) won the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and his latest collection is Newly Not Eternal (LSU, 2024). I had the privilege of meeting him in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was reading his poetry at an event with James Matthew Wilson, and John Poch.

His poetry is a musical experience, playing with rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia — sometimes cascading down the page in unexpected ways, that are more than mere measure. They are often fun to read, yet also engage with matters of significance — both relationally and spiritually.

The following poem originally appeared in The Hopkins Review. And is from Newly Not Eternal.

Ultrasound: Your Picture

-------------—Henry Thomas Clark, 10/7/14

We’ve framed an ultrasound
--------of you and Peter
holding hands
--------(or almost) in the womb,
your moon-bright arms
--------crossed in a black balloon
with week, and weights,
--------and heights in millimeters
penciled on the side.
--------We say it’s good
that he, at least, was with you
--------when you died,
that unlike us
--------you’ll never know the why
of being lonely
--------or what naked falsehood
feels like in one’s mind.
--------You see, it’s false

to say your death
--------was somehow grace. It’s grace
that spared Cain’s life
--------and later gave Eve other
sons, despite creation’s
--------wastes and faults.
I wish you could have known
--------love’s aftertastes.
I wish you’d had a chance
--------to hate your brother.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Joyce Kilmer

Joyce Kilmer (1886—1918) is a poet, lecturer, editor, journalist, and literary critic born in New Jersey. Shortly after his graduation from Columbia University he married fellow-poet Aline Murray; they had five children. Early on, he worked for Funk and Wagnall’s, contributing to The Standard Dictionary which eventually appeared in 1912. His first poetry collection, Summer of Love was published in 1911.

His work has been dismissed by critics and fellow poets as archaic in style and too simple in its thought. This is exemplified in his much-anthologised poem “Trees”
----I think that I shall never see
----A poem lovely as a tree…

Such views of his status were influenced by the radical shifts in poetic taste following WWI. His poem shares his confidence in God as creator, and is self-deprecating to the point of undermining the esteem his success would have otherwise brought. This simplicity, however, is what has attracted the editors of anthologies for school children to the poem. “Trees” first appeared in Poetry Magazine in August 1913 — quickly gaining him popularity as a poet in the U.S. — and subsequently became the title piece in Trees and Other Poems (1914).

He enlisted to fight in WWI, and was killed by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne at age 31.

Citizen of the World

No longer of Him be it said
"He hath no place to lay His head."

In every land a constant lamp
Flames by His small and mighty camp.

There is no strange and distant place
That is not gladdened by His face.

And every nation kneels to hail
The Splendour shining through Its veil.

Cloistered beside the shouting street,
Silent, He calls me to His feet.

Imprisoned for His love of me
He makes my spirit greatly free.

And through my lips that uttered sin
The King of Glory enters in.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Robert Cording*

Robert Cording is a Connecticut poet and professor emeritus at College of the Holy Cross where he taught for 38 years and became the Barrett Chair of English and Creative Writing. His tenth poetry collection In the Unwalled City (Slant, 2022) is an extended heart-breaking elegy for the untimely death of his adult son, Daniel. The book includes both poetry, and the essay of the book’s title. This twinned approach carries us intimately into the achingly honest experience of the poet.

Sydney Lea has said, “In a long and rich career, Robert Cording—indifferent to and transcendent of any vogue—has persisted in addressing what I can only and inadequately label matters of the spirit.” Lea refers to In the Unwalled City as Cording’s “most powerful work to date.”

The latest from Robert Cording is his What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems (Slant, 2026). I have the privilege of having worked with Bob on his earlier compilation — A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (2013). Some of his poems will also be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology Unto Us a Child is Born: The Kingdom Poets Book of Christmas.

The following poem appeared in The Hudson Review, and is from In the Unwalled City.

At the Cemetery

After my son’s death, October leaves fell
on schedule. Wood smoke blew across a field.

I could find nothing to steer the days.
There was only the lifeless freedom

Of my own helplessness. My future seemed
unendurable, and yet it had to be endured.

Now I meet him at his grave.
A summer thunderstorm announces itself

in flashes and gusts of wind that rip leaves
from the maple tree beside his grave,

where, once again, I think of his birth.
Unplanned, at home, ten minutes from first pains

to his beig here. Just like that, I feel him
rushing into my hands, the weight of him.

I think of this so I do not lose my fatherhood.
Now, as trees bend south to north in the cemetery,

and the storm approaches, groaning as St. Paul
says the world groans like a mother in childbirth,

I groan: Lord, grant me this fatherhood of pain,
do not let grief be finished with me,

if only because it gives birth to my dead son
who is both not here, and not not here.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Robert Cording: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

José Tolentino Mendonça

José Tolentino Mendonça is a Portuguese poet who was born on the Atlantic island of Madeira. He spent his childhood in Angola — a Portuguese colony up until he was nine (1975), when his family returned to Madeira. He has served as a priest, teacher, and chaplain at the Catholic University in Lisbon, has held multiple visiting professorships at two Jesuit-led schools in Brazil, and is now a Cardinal at the Vatican.

Mendonça is the author of at least thirteen poetry collections in Portuguese, his first published in 1990. He was a Straus Fellow at New York University during the academic year 2011-2012. His poetic subject-matter is more often secular than religious, and yet images of faith creep in, such as in the poem “The Childhood Of Herberto Helder” where he begins,
--------“In the beginning was the island
--------although it's said
--------that the Spirit of God
--------hugged the waters”

In 2025, Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça won the Eduardo Lourenço Prize for his contribution to contemporary Portuguese culture and his role as an intellectual, humanist and poet.

The following poem was translated by Ana Hudson.

Eschatology

And, at last, God returns
full of intimacy and unexpectedness
contemplated already from centuries above
humble measure of a verbal silence
we thought destined to be lost
See God climbing the steep path
that we have paced a thousand times
and stop to wait without impatience
meek as a sick lamb
Which one of us is the other’s shadow?
Even if no pity preserves the maps
we’ll come down close behind
rampant and empty
like a tree trunk

This post was suggested by Irish poet Gerard Smyth.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

N.F.S. Grundtvig

N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783—1872) is a Danish poet, pastor, educator, hymnwriter, philosopher, politician (serving as a member of the Danish Constituent Assembly), and historian. He is extremely important in Denmark as a nationalist, social reformer, Lutheran theologian, and for his establishing of folk high schools. His style of writing, and his limiting references, made him unlikely to draw much attention from an international audience, and yet he is consider one of the most influential people in Danish history.

Nicolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (pronounced Groont-vi) was active in what is considered Denmark’s Golden Age — the first half of the 19th century. His output was impressive, writing in a wide range of fields, such as with his The First World Chronicle (1812) an outline of the history of belief in God, including his criticisms of many prominent Danes. His book-length historical poem Rhyme of Roskilde appeared in 1813. He published many theological works, regularly preached sermons, published a collection of sacred poetry (Song Work for the Danish Church), edited and translated the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Phoenix", and translated Beowulf into Danish (1820).

As a tribute to him, the Neo-Gothic expressionist Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen was designed by Danish architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, and was completed in 1940.

A Simple, Cheerful Active Life On Earth

A simple, cheerful, active life on earth,
A cup I’d not exchange for monarch’s chalice,
In noble forebears’ tracks a path since birth,
With equal dignity in hut and palace,
With eye as when created heav’nward turned,
All beauty here and grandness keenly knowing,
Familiar though with those things deeply yearned,
Stilled only by eternity’s bright glowing.

I wished for all my line just such a life,
And zealously I planned for its fruition,
And when my soul grew tired from toil and strife,
The ‘Lord’s Prayer’ was its rest and its nutrition.
Then from truth’s spirit I great comfort gained,
And felt joy hover o’er each garden border,
When dust is placed in its creator’s hand
And all is waited for in nature’s order:

Just fresh, green buds that sprout in early spring,
And in the summer heat the flowers’ profusion;
And when the plants mature and long to bring
Their harvest fruit to autumn’s full conclusion!
The human span assigned is short or long,
It is for common weal, its yield is growing;
The day that started well will end as strong,
And just as sweet will be its afterglowing.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Claudia Lee Hae-in

Claudia Lee Hae-in is a South Korean Catholic Nun who’s published eighteen poetry collections, beginning with The Land of Dandelions (1976). She’s sold almost two million copies of her poetry books, and her name has been raised during considerations for the Nobel Prize.

In 2008, she had a serious bout with rectal cancer — and in 2015, a news report circulated that she had died, and her “last poem” was widely shared. Reports of her death, as Mark Twain once quipped, were greatly exaggerated. Lee said, “I could forgive the fake news, but I can’t go easy on the fake poem.”

According to The Korea Times, “She affirms that her literary insights have been transformed through praying to Jesus.”

Balloon Flower

How thin and beautiful is the summer dress you wear,
delighting me with your violet fragrance!
Soaked in cold dewdrops, you whisper so shyly.
As you gather innocent glances of love in your heart,
a round smile blooms on your silent lips.
Even if passing time leaves nothing
But tears to daunt my mind,
I wish to spend my whole life in prayer
as mild as your humble smiles.
How could you come so unexpectedly
from an unknown country so far away?
Some other day, will you bloom on my tomb
to recite a prayer or two for my wandering soul?

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.