Phases
Mischa Willett
Phases
Copyright © 2017 Mischa Willett. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1035-6
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-1037-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-1036-3
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Willett, Mischa
Title: Phases / Mischa Willett.
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books 2017 | Series: The Poiema Poetry Series.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-1035-6 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-1037-0 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-1036-3 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Christian life—Poetry | Fiction / General | Christian life
Classification: PS3623.I45 P43 2017 (paperback) | PS3623 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
The Poiema Poetry Series
Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won’t twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet’s company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value—to get at something important.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “We are God’s workmanship . . .” poiema in Greek—the thing that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through their creativity and craftsmanship.
These poets are recent participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the centuries—through the diverse poetic visions of Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and Denise Levertov—down to the poet whose work is in your hand. With the selection of this volume you are entering this enduring tradition, and as a reader contributing to it.
—D.S. Martin
Series Editor
For my gone friends, the poets Jim Simmerman (1952–2006) and Brett Foster (1973–2015)
Pastoral
Let us not overlook, he says looking out over
us from the lectern like a shepherd
with a crook of words bent on folding
us back into our pen, or penning
us back to our fold, the stupidity
and defenselessness of sheep.
We bleat: in this analogy, who
are we? He proceeds. Goats, you
see, can handle themselves. Horns
and hoofs, cranial helmets they ram
full tilt into posts, or other goats. But sheep
mind you, sheep have no homing device,
which is why stories begin with a lost one;
they’re even known to head toward danger
—oh look, a wolf! Let’s check it out!— in dumb
allegiance to the interesting, which I find
interesting, and think: how to amend
our sheepish ways? But he, to drive
home both the point and oh ye,
sighs it’s beyond you; beyond me.
When the 26 African Queens Escaped
And mated with local bees
they created a masterpiece
of evolutionary advantage and a menace
to the whole talon hook by which
South America dangles from the north.
Apis mellifera adansonii, or
“our fury will visit like a storm”
belligerated in response to the Rhodesian
stone age that hustled them from hives
torchwise, a stinging insult
to the migrants, who would’ve left
in season. Captured and shipped
to Brazil to—what else?—increase production,
they flourished more as flame
than flower, and now, take down deer,
children, the odd cow, their vengeance ichor,
anger power.
I Was Cold and You Lit Me on Fire
When I was Hungary, you bled
me. I leaned my long hair out
the window and you climbed it.
Blessed are you who, when I
was a stone, made a slingshot,
who slew the dragon
I was stuck behind.
Those gathered said, Word,
when
