I Call to You from Time

By Judith Sornberger

The desire and struggle to pray pulses through this spiritually resonant collection in forms as various as psalms, Tai Chi, meditation, needlework, lament, and thanksgiving. Even poems not overtly about prayer lead the reader into prayer-like contemplation as the poet considers war, environmental devastation, corporate greed, and poverty as personal, as well as sociopolitical, subjects.

Crossing borders between the distant and the local, the historic and the contemporary, I Call to You from Time also reaches beyond the temporal to the eternal. Poems responding to paintings of the Virgin Mary are echoed in others about the poet's own motherhood and her son's deployments to--and wounding in--Iraq and Afghanistan. The poet discovers Our Lady of Guadalupe emblazoned on a toss pillow at Walmart and encounters the Virgin Mary at a rest stop in Nebraska. Laundry hung in a neighbor's yard recalls Tibetan prayer flags, while deers' hoof prints in the snowy woods lead to evidence of fracking.

Personal, political, and planetary brokenness are encountered throughout, yet the poems in I Call to You from Time seek to create from their shards a mosaic of meaning in which we find ourselves connected to one another and to the divine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532688119

Judith Sornberger

Judith Sornberger’s previous full-length poetry collections are Practicing the World and Open Heart; she also wrote her memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany. As a professor of English at Mansfield University, she taught poetry and creative nonfiction writing for twenty-five years, as well as creating, directing, and teaching in the Women’s Studies program.

Book preview

Inside-Out Pantoum

Prayer is a there

I often cannot enter.

However much I haunt the grounds,

pace around its stucco-washed façade,

strain my gaze through sainted glass,

prayer is a there

whose door is locked, whose incense

I too often cannot enter.

I shake the oak door in its jamb,

strain my gaze through sainted glass,

but cannot enter the within

whose door is locked, whose incense

will not enter my blood’s chambers.

I shake the oak door in its jamb,

as if it is no part of who I am,

but I cannot enter the within.

Or prayer is an element so foreign

I won’t invite it into my blood’s chambers,

an inner sea I fear to drown in

as if it is no part of who I am.

As if it is a where I can dive into,

prayer is an element so foreign

I hold my breath to enter

the inner sea I fear to drown in.

Prayer ripples and gleams darkly

as if it is a where I can dive into,

a depth I stroke against

even as I hold my breath to enter,

still holding to a vision of myself

in prayer’s ripples gleaming darkly.

Sometimes the inner sea sends up a swell,

a depth I stroke against.

I am not allowed to enter there

still holding to a vision of myself.

Still, when the inner sea sends up its swell,

sometimes I am mercifully swallowed.

I.

Why I Am Not Quite a Buddhist

God has many