Gail Fox

Gail Fox is a Canadian poet who was raised in Connecticut and upper New York State, but moved to Kingston, Ontario in 1967. It was there she began writing seriously and became associated with the poets at Queen’s University. The first of her many poetry collections, The Dangerous Season, appeared in 1969. She also became editor of the Kingston-based journal Quarry.

She later was married for a season to New Brunswick poet Fred Cogswell, who died in 2004. Her selected poems The End of Innocence (Oberon) was published in 1988, and The Dark Side of the Moon (St. Thomas Poetry Series) in 2000. At this point Fox, who lived in New Brunswick, began focussing on her painting.

The Beginning of Contemplation

(For Margaret Avison)

The countryside sparks and blazes, and
diehard leaves upon the branches burn with
the same intensity that collapses stars.

I tell you truly that now I know the shape
of goldenrod, that God, the fireball, against
a backdrop of deep pines, is sinking into my
head at the velocity of light.

From undisclosed sources, the pain in my
head is as quiet as overhanging grasses,
brown, frozen, stiff as driftwood from some
immense ocean.

This is the beginning of contemplation.
This, the sparkling rocks and golden
butterflies, is the living Jesus. Gorgeous
the sun over the slim legs of the evening.

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.

Vassar Miller*

Vassar Miller (1924—1998) is another Texas poet of faith who served as the state’s Poet Laureate — in her case, twice. She is the author of ten books of poetry including her collected volume If I Had Wheels or Love (Southern Methodist University Press, 1991).

She was born with Cerebral Palsy, which confined her to a wheelchair. Despite barriers, she earned her BA and MA from the University of Houston. She also taught creative writing for many years at the University of St. Thomas.

Denise Levertov said, “I love Vassar Miller’s poetry for its qualities of density, stone-carved complexity, earned hardness, unsentimental compassion…. I salute [her] artistry and strength, and the beauty of her somber, profoundly experienced creations.”

The following poem is from her book Struggling to Swim on Concrete (The New Orleans Poetry Journal Press, 1984).

Morning Person

God, best at making in the morning, tossed
stars and planets, singing and dancing, rolled
Saturn’s rings spinning and humming, twirled the earth
so hard it coughed and spat the moon up, brilliant
bubble floating around it for good, stretched holy
hands till birds in nervous sparks flew forth from
them and beasts — lizards, big and little, apes,
lions, elephants, dogs and cats cavorting,
tumbling over themselves, dizzy with joy when
God made us in the morning too, both man
and woman, leaving Adam no time for
sleep so nimbly was Eve bouncing out of
his side till as night came everything and
everybody, growing tired, declined, sat
down in one soft descended Hallelujah.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Vassar Miller: 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.

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 about stealing 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.

Alcuin

Alcuin (c. 735–804) is a scholar, clergyman, poet, teacher, and a significant figure in the court of Charlemagne. He was born in Northumbria, and educated at the York cathedral school from a young age. He frequently travelled to the continent — at first to acquire books and artworks for the expanding library at York, which became quite well known until it unfortunately was destroyed in 866 during a raid by marauding Vikings.

On his return from a journey to Rome, he was invited to join a scholastic union of intellectuals, selected by Charlemagne, from across Europe, formed at his court at Aachen. Alcuin wrote poetry, letters and grammatical instructions as well as theological treatises. His surviving writings, are an important source for scholars concerning this time period. One of his greatest contributions was the Golden Gospels, an illuminated manuscript written in gold on purple vellum. He died at Marmoutier Abbey in Tours.

The following poem was translated from the Latin by Maryann Corbett. It first appeared in Cerise Press, is from her poetry collection Mid Evil (Evansville, 2015), and appears in To Heaven's Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Poetry edited by Burl Horniachek.

Concerning A Nightingale

Jealousy, that’s what it was. It was thin-fingered envy that nabbed you,
----stealing away my delight, Nightingale, out of the broom!
Sour as my soul had become, you could fill it with honeying sweetness,
----lilting it into my ears, lifting it into my heart.
Come, all you creatures with wings! Let them come from the corners of
--heaven
----adding their grief to my own, singing the song of the muse.
Not much to look at for color, but sound that could carry my heart off:
----sound with the breadth of the air poured from your throat’s little strait,
sweetness in dollops and pours and melismas, repeating, renewing,
----always a song in your mouth to him who is maker of all.
Everywhere night and its terrible blackness, yet still you were singing,
----voice that should still us to prayer, ornament hung on the dark.
Why should we wonder at all at the angels eternally chanting
----praise to the Lord of the storm? You could sing endlessly too.

Posted with permission of the translator

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.

Brian Volck*

Brian Volck is both a pediatrician and a poet who has recently relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He still teaches, however, at the Ecumenical Institute at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland. His first poetry collection Flesh Becomes Word was published in 2013 (Dos Madras Press).

His new book, Chora has just appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. I am pleased to say I worked with Brian to ready this book for publication. Paul Mariani has said about this new book:
----"Brian Volck's Chora is a brilliant collection of poems, covering all
----seasons, often month by month, and so many splendid locations,
----from Baltimore and Cincinnati to the American West — especially
----among the Navajo nation — to Europe and Greece. He's a deeply
----philosophical thinker, versed in the Hebrew scriptures and
----especially in the Gospels, offering one new insight after another.
----Then too there is the way he keeps returning, with the help of his
----wife and muse, to the beauty right there before him, as women so
----often see it first. Yes, and there is of course, being the physician,
----pediatrician, and teacher that he is, the reality of human suffering
----and the deep loss of our loved ones. Page after page offers us
----another insight, a new sense of reality that only the poem can
----offer: the elegiac, yes, but then too the bounty of blessings we
----have been given."

The following poem is from Chora (Poiema/Cascade, 2026)

Treasures of TANAKH Hebrew: Hineni

I am not ready, my mind a beehive
of regret for blunders past redemption
and fear for my—and my children’s—future.

I am not ready, my heart beleaguered
by contrary loves, frayed fidelities,
what is dearest to me most neglected.

I am not ready, my body weary,
muscles slackened from wonted indolence,
flesh scarred by the cudgels of compulsion.

Do not compel me yet to the mountain
of trial nor demand more sacrifice
from the plundered household of my hope.

Late have I turned, invoking your name,
trusting you to shepherd my wayward mind
and drive the darkening clouds from my heart.

Open, then, my mouth that I might utter
in your presence the words I long to say:
Here I am, Adonai. I am ready.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Brian Volck: 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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge*

Samuel Tayler Coleridge (1772—1834) is describe by the Poetry Foundation as “the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse.” As a religious thinker his writings influenced philosophical views in the areas of aesthetics, theology, and the philosophy of the mind. His focus on the imagination, and the importance of well-chosen metaphors for influencing the way we view ourselves impacted English intellectual life.

His first collection, Poems on Various Subjects, appeared in 1796. During the preceding year he met William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. In 1797 and 1798, Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, just three miles from Wordsworth. This was the most productive poetic period of his life, in which Coleridge wrote such poems as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “Frost at Midnight”, and “The Nightingale”.

Coleridge’s great work of literary criticism Biographia Literaria appeared in 1817.

from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.

O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!—

To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Samuel Taylor Coleridge: first post, second post, third 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.

Gerard Smyth*

Gerard Smyth is above all else, a Dublin poet. He was born in Dublin in 1951, and lives there still. He is the author of eleven books of poetry. In his most-recent collection The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus Press, 2026), he has several poems about his city featuring various Dublin poets and artists, including Thomas Kinsella, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly, and Luke Kelly (founding member of the folk group The Dubliners).

Smyth’s enriching nostalgia also reflects on musical greats from his youth, tributes to the beat poets, and acknowledgements of foreign-language poets he admires, such as Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva.

This May, my wife and I had the privilege of having lunch with Gerard Smyth, and John F. Deane, at a Dublin pub called “The Downing Well”. There we exchanged our latest poetry collections and talked of poetry — both in Ireland and Canada.

The following poem is from The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus Press, 2026).

What the Young Saint Said

for John F Deane

Let God be God, the young saint said,
not Roman, not Greek,
or belonging only to pilgrim and conqueror
but the God of all things: the Judas Tree
and hornet’s nest, songthrush and garden slug.

Let God be God, not the bearer of so many names
or the judge who sits in the court of angels.
Let him not be the gatekeeper at the Gates of Wrath,
the tormenter of an innocent conscience.

Let God be God, the young saint said,
not the cause of holy wars
or one who sends his proxies to rob our mirth
but a God unbothered by heresies of dogma,
His presence heard in the singer’s voice,
sound of the orchestra, the iron gate
when it creaks, the bells on Paternoster Street.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Gerard Smyth: 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.

Ella Higginson

Ella Higginson (c.1861—1940) is an early literary voice of the Pacific Northwest. She was born in Kansas, and was taken to Oregon by her parents in her early childhood. She began publishing poetry and short stories in national magazines shortly after she and her husband had settled in (what is now) Bellingham, Washington.

Among other things, she published six books of poetry, including When the Birds Go North Again (Macmillan, 1898), and The Vanishing Race and Other Poems (1911). She helped found Bellingham’s first library, was active in supporting women’s rights, and has been described as a “Protestant Ecofeminist”

Ella Higginson was the first Poet Laureate of Washington State.

She Prays

Lord God, Lord God, while perfect Love
--------Sits my hearthstone beside,
And Joy and Rapture are my guests,
--------And I am all untried,
And all my hours are blissful hours—
--------With me abide!

And Lord, Lord God, if Grief must come,
--------And friendship break away;
If I must drink Love’s quassia-cup
--------With trembling lips and gray,
And all my hours are bitter hours—
--------Be Thou my stay!

Yea, let me keep unto the end
--------My perfect faith in Thee,
And bow, submissive, when Thou sayest,
--------“It cannot be!”
Thou, only, knowest all my heart—
--------Be merciful to me!

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.

Patrick Kavanagh *

Patrick Kavanagh (1904—1967) is one of Ireland’s best-loved poets. He was born in County Monaghan, and published his first collection Ploughman and Other Poems (MacMillan) in 1936. In 1938 he briefly moved to London in search of literary work, finally settling in Dublin in 1939.

The folk group The Dubliners put Kavanagh’s poem “On Raglan Road” to music (released in 1971). It has since been recorded many times, perhaps most-significantly on the Van Morrison and the Chieftains album Irish Heartbeat (Mercury Records, 1988). The Irish Times surveyed ‘the nation’s favourite poems’ in 2000, and ten of Kavanagh’s poems were in the first fifty.

Last month my wife and I visited Dublin for the first time, and I had the chance to seek out his sculpture on a bench along the Grand Canal. It is there to honour him for his poems “Canal Bank Walk” (which can be read here), and “Lines Written On a Seat On the Grand Canal. Dublin”.

On the back of my Penguin paperback of his Selected Poems, there’s a quote from Seamus Heaney regarding Kavanagh’s verse: “These poems… make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading… ‘You must change your life’”.

Ploughman

I turn the lea-green down
Gaily now,
And paint the meadow brown
With my plough.
I dream with silvery gull
And brazen crow.
A thing that is beautiful
I may know.
Tranquillity walks with me
And no care.
O, the quiet ecstasy
Like a prayer.
I find a star lovely art
In a dark sod.
Joy that is timeless! O heart
That knows God!

Sanctity

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonising pincer-jaws of Heaven

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Patrick Kavanagh: 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.

Christina Rossetti*

Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) is one of the Victorian age’s most significant poets. Besides poetry she also wrote fiction and devotional reflections. From 1870 to 1872 she was dangerously and violently ill with Grave’s Disease, which caused her hair to fall out, and for her to lose consciousness.

After she recovered, Rossetti published six volumes of devotional prose. According to the Poetry Foundation: “In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols.” In the first of these books Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874) she shared 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ.”

In 1892 Rossetti published her book The Face of the Deep — an in-depth meditation on the Book of Revelation which included many poems. The following poem is her response to the opening verses of Revelation 5:
---“Then I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll
---with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals. And I saw
---a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to break
---the seals and open the scroll?’”

None Other Lamb

None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other hope in Heav’n or earth or sea,
None other hiding place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee!

My faith burns low, my hope burns low;
Only my heart’s desire cries out in me
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.

Lord, Thou art Life, though I be dead;
Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be:
Nor Heav’n have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee.

*This is the fifth Kingdom Poets post about Christina Rossetti: first post, second post, third post, fourth 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.

A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. Even so, I heard him reading from his new collection last month — to a slight Saturday afternoon gathering of poetry lovers — at a tiny independent bookstore in London, Ontario — coincidentally called Little Wren Books.

His 24th poetry collection (depending on how you count) The Wren is a bit of a departure for him, in that this writer of longer, long-lined poems has deliberately created a book of short poems. More than sixty of the poems are shorter than sonnets, and some even shorter than haiku. What this offers, in my view, is a stripped-back collection that affords greater accessibility, and personal interaction with the poems. Novelist Michael Helm has said “In The Wren we meet essential poetry. The address is direct, the lines narrow, poems short. With subtle, turning movements the book offers arrival and furtherance, findings and beautiful modifications toward ideas and figures of rare exactness…”

The following poems are from The Wren (House of Anansi, 2026)

The Central Moment
(Homage to William Blake)

Troubles must come but woe to those
through whom they come. Better to have a millstone
fastened around your neck and be flung into the sea
than to disturb the faith of even one
of these little ones. So said angry love and peace—
what we might call the real real. And now
I am the little ones lolling, white and diseased
In ever-repeated questioning, and I am
the one who injected it into me. I am the neck
and the millstone. I am thrown from myself.
I am perpetually suffocating in the glory
or is it the horror of the shoreless sea.

Faithfulness

Time will run out on you,
they say. No. Time never
runs out.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the third Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: 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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow*

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) is a poet who achieved international success before other American writers had. He supported the abolitionist cause through his slim 1842 book Poems on Slavery, which he allowed the New England Anti-Slavery Tract Society to reprint and distribute free of royalties.

His verse romance Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), written in Virgilian dactylic hexameter, expounds the legend of Acadian lovers separated on the day they were to be wed when the English expelled French Canadian Acadians from Nova Scotia. The book won admiration on both sides of the Atlantic, and became the most celebrated American poem of the century.

The following poem, published in 1838, is one of several from Longfellow widely shared in classrooms and anthologized in school textbooks — making it well known to a wide readership. It appeared in his early collection, Voices of the Night (1839).

Longfellow is honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, which few other Americans have been.

A Psalm of Life

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
---Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
---And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
---And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
---Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
---Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
---Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
---And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
---Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
---In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
---Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
---Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
---Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
---We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
---Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
---Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
---Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
---With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
---Learn to labor and to wait.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 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.

Emma Tatham

Emma Tatham (1829—1855) is a British poet, born in London, whose work was first published in On the Ocean of Time (1850),and subsequently in The Dream of Pythagoras and Other Poems (1854). She and her family were Wesleyan Methodists, attending the Great Queen Street Chapel. In 1847, they left London, moving to Margate in Kent, primarily due to a severe bout of whooping cough she experienced. She started a small school there, but her poor health did not permit her to continue. She also suffered a period of depression.

Her poems resonate with her Christian worldview. She was highly praised by critics — even those not companions in the faith. Matthew Arnold compared her with the French poet Eugénie de Guérin in one essay, and in another said, "she had a sincere vein of poetical feeling, a genuine aptitude for composition."

She corresponded with Methodist minister Benjamin Gregory, the pastor of the chapel in London, who encouraged her poetry. She shared with him about the poets she was reading. Her favourite was William Wordsworth; she described him as “like a forest stream, still and deep” — contrasting him with Byron who was “more like a troubled mountain cataract”. Gregory published a biography of Tatham in 1859.

Thou Who Dost Write Thy Name

In rapture's tears upon the rainbow's arch;
And trace it on the mountains with a swift
And eloquent lightning pen; and on the flowers
With pencil dipp'd in honey and the dye
Of morning's ruddy cheek and golden hair;
And on the eyes of childhood with sunbeams;
And on the wings of glorious butterfly
With powdery gems and gold;
On angels' foreheads with the flaming plume
Of intellect's white wing, dipp'd in the fire
Of inspiration; on the martyr's brow
With blood; and on the cataracts in heaps
Of thunder visible; and on clouds of storm
In rapturous blackness; and on morning's eyes
With fading stars; and on the hearts of saints
In Thy own beautiful image crimson-traced
As by a pierced hand:
O Thou whose poetry and love in one,
Walk forth where'er Thou art, and hand in hand
Encircle heaven and earth, Thou above praise!
Exalted infinitely; O great GOD!
Hear me, and make me a pure golden harp
For Thy soft finger. Might I be Thy bird,
Hidden from all, singing to Thee alone.

This post was suggested by a new friend of Kingdom Poets, Riccardo Ricci, an Italian evangelical missionary in Greece.

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 available from Paraclete Press.

Nellie deVries

Nellie deVries is a Michigan poet, and the author of the new collection Japanese Garden: Four Seasons of Poems. (Resource Publications, 2026). Although she has authored three books for children through Baker Book House, this is her first poetry collection.

She was one of the participants in my festival circle group at the Festival of Faith & Writing back in 2014, and shared her poetry in my subsequent blog The 55 Project. Since then her poems have appeared in such publications as: Peninsula Poets, VietNow, Heart of Flesh, Exhale, and the anthologies Busy Griefs, Raw Towns; Michigan Roots, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

The following poem appeared in the anthology Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse edited by D.S. Martin (Poiema/Cascade, 2017).

Dwelling

2 Corinthians 5; 2 Timothy 4

In a Roman prison
the tentmaker looks at his hands,
calloused and needle-pricked,
and remembers a metaphor he had written:
...if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed,
we have a building from God, an eternal house
in heaven, not built by human hands.

He shudders at the chill autumn winds
and groans, longing to be clothed
wiht his heavenly dwelling.
With cold-gnarled fingers he grabs a quill
and writes, My dear son, I long to see you.
Bring my cloak, and my scrols, especially
the parchments. Come to me quickly.
Do your best to get here before winter.

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.