Jim Daniels: Ghost Guns
Plush Jesus dolls scattered
on the picked-over discount table
at the dollar store
Sandy Solomon: While You’re Away
Were it a question not of days but weeks
I’d learn, I’m sure, to sprawl mid-bed, the way,
before we met, I did.
Adam Patric Miller: Next Year’s Words
I scroll down and am stunned to see a large ad sponsored by The Jewish Agency for Israel featuring a former student who is going to share his “powerful story of strength, sacrifice, and service” fighting as “a lone soldier” for the IDF.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Psalm for Sunrise
Let the horses of dreaming ramble
home slowly from their sweet dark pastures.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Chana Bloch: The New World
That’s the old country for you:
they ate with their hands, went hungry to bed,
slept in their stink. When pain knocked,
they opened the door.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Linda Parsons: Two Poems for Christmas
the light hasn’t always been easy to find—
haloed fires of childhood, my walk
on coals to the marriage pyre, parents
passed to flame and ash. All have sparked
the change ahead, all have lit the way.
William Butler Yeats: The Magi
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
Ma Yongbo: I Have Always Been in Love With You (English and Chinese)
Sometimes I suddenly stop on the road
feel a breeze brushing my ears
That’s you passing by
Michelle Bitting: Savior
Who will be called to save the world?
No one knows
but the beast rides farther into green,
its mane swaying to the trill of a violin.
Video: Hildegard of Bingen | Love Aboundeth In All Things
There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words.
Michael Simms: Jubilate
Now I shall praise our dog Josie
the bodhisattva of our household
the perfect embodiment
of devotion, always present
in spontaneous awe
