I chose the name “Shorelines: Words Like Sand” for this site because, simply, this is a place where my thoughts and ideas are gathered like grains of sand on a shore. In all my vulnerability as a writer, I have cast these words upon remembered beaches, upon no easy mercy and every windfall grace. In the forging of these poems, I have, at times, perished upon a single word, and at other times—has not God wrought life in me—through devices not my own!
I do not pretend these poems to be anything other than what they are. They are not the best that you will read, perhaps not the most profound, but they meet you here in all humility and in everything I find most beautiful and sacred and deep about the world and the created order. The sand is necessary for providing stability, security and habitat for humanity and the ecosystems found there. Unlike the sand, my words are not necessary, but perhaps for a time they provide a safe haven, a place of recognition, where one song is finished and another, elusive in its cadence. My poems seek ultimately to give praise to God who reveals himself through creation in such a way that one might assume a lawless abandonment of the Divine senses. Yet these words are transient, a summering meadow, and will be lost to time in its bending tides, as will everything. But nothing ultimately shall be lost because all is in God, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). All of our praise, all of our sorrows, every single grain of our being, no matter how fine or even how negligible, will never be lost to God, who loves wildly, and without decorum. Mightily, like a storm of sand.
You will also find a section with its own name, “Soundings,” which includes, not poetry, but a variety of reflection pieces on such themes as theology, nature and culture. These pieces may be accessed using the button located at the bottom of this page.
It is my delight to include a page dedicated to the artistic work of my friend, Vatsala Radhakeeson, of Maritius. She is also a very fine poet of many years, and only started painting seven years ago. I find her work to be quite extraordinary, the colors flowing, moving deftly, like the rivers that I love. I hope that you will visit her page and enjoy Vatsala’s Spirit-given craft.
It is also my hope that visitors of this site will enjoy what is offered here. I have found much joy in gathering these poems and reflections! May some of these words meet you somehow, wherever you are, on whatever shore your light may be burning…
Thank you for stopping by.
Even the Egret
On Hurricane Helene
The river forgets its name, its language, foreign.
Tongues sent from heaven overcome the freshets,
Yet the river rides the stony bed, a mad horseman.
The dissonance split rocks and ears, Earth lies confused,
even the egret.
Little houses watch the river with eyes, terror-stricken,
For this river they do not know, in its surging wildness.
Neither does the river know them, the blue mountains are sinking.
A green-eyed doll is taken, a toy John Deere, a woman left childless.
Beholding all of this is the egret, from an old straight backed cedar,
He does not understand this reason-defying foreclosure on the Earth.
The breaking rocks, the river with no memory, must, somewhere
have a keeper.
Somewhere there is a trellised sky of blue star, awaiting the crushing
of the curse.
Over the waters flies the vagrant egret,
Bearing within his pulsing avian heart a name and a secret.
Even the Egret was first published in the Spring 2025 edition of The Emerson Review.
Turtle Life
Flash of lightning in my window tonight—
the backwaters are stilled and suffering
an Easter sorrow. My quickened
thoughts retreat into a shell, fractured
and final. Memory unfurls like thunder,
soft, a turtle in a swaddled box,
struggling to die well. Touch the cool,
cracked stone. The dregs of life pool
and stir beneath. Lifting this tender
word, my beggarly eyes meet his—
a flash of knowing at river’s edge,
light finally beckoning light.
Turtle Life was first published in the Summer 2025 edition of The Orchards Poetry Review.
The Sun Will Never Say
The sun is silent
She will not speak today
or on the morrow.
She will remember
the sweep of sunlight
upon the warm boulder
yet she shall not speak of it
She will remember the river skyward
in which we swam
and the bloom of the trillium
growing courageous
among the beaten mountain path
The sun will remember the tender motions
of flesh upon flesh
and of this
Wisdom’s sun will never say
the mystery
The Sun Will Never Say was first published in Reader’s Choice Literary Magazine in Summer 2024.
In Cloths of Heaven
On that day
at the fringes of time
when earth’s silk
has been spun in full
when the earth has been turned
a thousand times
beyond
I shall meet you
in cloths of heaven
We shall rest
shining
among such gardens rare
no fence unmended
a kiss exchanging
just once
for an orange sweet
in the whisperings
of weft and warp
your name on my breath
beneath chapel arches
a supper shared
in this windfall light
our alleluias
beginning
again
Mother, I Climbed
These stones remember
no primrose vows
only the carriage
of winters
spilt
into that summer of birches
trembling
with each rain
You and I
wearing
the river only
no servile kiss
the sun uncoiling
blush of pomegranate
You held out your hand
and I climbed
yes, mother, I climbed
into his arms
and went with him
to his house on the mountain
his stone house
where the waxwing sang
in cedared rafters
Mother, I Climbed was first published by Transcendent Zero Press, May 2022.
So Long Remembering
An erasure poem based on Germinal by Emil Zola
Beneath
the deep blows
of winter
the bent back
of the field
so long
remembering
wild flowers
Now, Now
spring draws
near
the field
cracking
brumal
ever warming
filled with light
whispering voices
brush of a holy kiss
In the furrows
dawn
of the next earth
So Long Remembering was first published in the Spring 2020 edition of Amethyst Review.
Settle the Earth
What scenes do I behold
where the earth (a bride yet again)
is tilled
and dark seed is cast
rising
falling
with shouts of Hosannah
from the furrowed morning
Fields of ardent light
maiden
her skirts of rose-fallen sash
spread for plough
and piercing blade
in bloodrich earth
life riven and life wrought
a brother catches his brother’s heel
in the writhing womb
Cresting hills
their ancient quarrels mended
a seam of cows exulting
stream by stream
threading through
evergoing fields
swallows wheeling
carrying aloft the barns
in thinning light
By this new river
set the stone firm
plant a tree for figs
what has been given us is enough
to settle the earth
A Life Not Our Own
On the Killing of an Enemy of the United States, October 2019
The lights of the television crews shone as bright as a Syrian sun.
The scene was set for a Presidential appearance,
red backdrop, no doubt for victory, the letting of blood, over the deserts run.
The blotting out of evil, through a “hole in the wall” a final disappearance.
The scene was set for a Presidential appearance,
At 35.8 degrees N, 36.7 degrees E, a mass of rubble marked the grave of four.
It was the blotting out of evil, through a “hole in the wall,’ a final disappearance.
The man in the blue suit boasted that they hadn’t used the door.
At 35.8 degrees N, 36.7 degrees E, a mass of rubble marked the grave of four.
The target was “screaming, crying and whimpering”, “like a dog.”
The man in the blue suit boasted that they hadn’t used the door.
Somewhere an old woman sat at a fire, remembering a Syrian song.
The target was “screaming, crying and whimpering,” “like a dog.”
The man in blue said that he died like an animal. That’s what he was.
Somewhere an old woman sat at a fire, remembering a Syrian song.
In her weathered hands a white carnation, in her hair the stars.
The man in blue said that he died like an animal. That’s what he was.
He does not understand to ask for mercy for taking a life not our own.
In her weathered hands a carnation, in her hair the stars.
The mother of the dead weeps quietly where night and day are sewn.
A Life Not Our Own was first published in the Adelaide Literary Magazine, Fall 2020.
As Before
On the pandemic
Winter is the right time
for a virus,
I suppose,
for in its hollow,
soundless days
we are twining
helices,
warm,
in hope’s deep hold
where mammal dreams
stir and waken
to a country
of earth-breaking marigolds,
forsaking the days
that take away our breath,
the masks of pretense
and vagaries that ride
snowy plumed breezes.
On the hearthstone
let despair burn brittle
as tinder in the ash.
Therefore
with perseverance
and a will to fight
until the jessamine
overtakes our graves,
and the Monarch leaves
its branch no more,
a new fire shall burn in winter,
and in its rising light
we shall see one another
face to face,
as before
As Before was first published in BlazeVox Literary Journal, Spring 2021.
Among the Lovely Earth
I have seen no sign of life
from the carrot seeds that I planted.
They lie beneath,
not taken with the sun,
nor delighting in the shower of water
which I have given them each afternoon.
What lies beneath
is an ache,
a fear of going
where I do not
want to go,
that perhaps the failure
of the seeds was I.
Perhaps the failure
of far greater things
may be claimed by me.
What lies beneath
is a manner of
unsettled pain,
as the earth is unsettled
the first time the plough
is put to its quiet crust,
and cuts a furrow
through what once was content
to be nothing but a field,
fallow for some years,
but now sees the sun
and its burning gaze,
the sage light,
the floating darkness…
What lies beneath is the pain
of wounds healing,
the pain of an old sorrow
being borne away
on a wing of the moon.
At last, at last,
here is the seed,
received into the furrow,
cradled, warm,
among the lovely earth.
Among the Lovely Earth was first published in The Weekly Avocet, May 2023.
Nights
For my father (1939-2009)
Nights were the nicotine light of the stove,
my father’s ashing Marlboro losing time,
the Made in China teapot half awake,
grousing upon the eye.
The Sun had dwelled in his skin,
sienna, his trembling hands,
now old, mapped by sea-blue veins.
Nights were waiting,
brewing thoughts as the
Folgers single bags steeped in
favored mugs.
Nights were no conversation.
Only silence burning away
the days, the weeks, the months.
My father will take one more drag of
his Marlboro, one smoke ring metastasizing
into a thousand more.
“Goodnight, darling” A kiss on the head.
Nights. The dimming light. The coming loss.
The dogwood is past its season.
One night will awaken me to find the kitchen dark,
the teapot silenced, no conversation, only silent prayers,
plumes of incense rising to the outer light.
Nights are for mourning, ashing grief never burning,
burning away, only changing shapes in
the clandestine light.
Nights was first published in Autumn Sky Daily, November 2023.
Things Visible
They dotted the fields,
wafers cast from the blueing sky—
the cotton bolls. My father
once told me that
on the nickel-backed
days of summer, he would
pluck the fleecy white stuff
from its mothering
bur, tearing his hands.
The melting sun brimmed
with fire majestic, a silvered
chalice pouring ironstone
onto the boy’s back.
Blood on one hand, a nickel
in the other, a red, sun-branded
back, cirrus clouds, feathering
the waning afternoon sky.
All things visible. The hovering
angels, rivers of wind,
gravity and grace, the fathoms
of love, all things invisible.
Yet the boy, in his youth,
considered only the cold,
fizzling nectar of the Coca-Cola
that lingered upon his tongue.
And he walked the tracks
to his saltbox home
in the light, wasting and tepid,
of his crosshatch town.
Things Visible was first published in The Tipton Poetry Review, Winter 2025.
The Shepherding Trees
The shepherding trees upon our hills render
a scene of flaming wing of Autumn’s descent,
Spring’s writhing, perishing song of lament
to which none will bow nor comfort tender.
Our ghosts are not seen upon those hills climbing.
Your houndstooth coat never hung upon a bough.
Never was there bark burned with our silent, secret vow,
pressed between the leaves of my memory, residing.
Unforgetting you makes a stronger tree these thirty years.
Love grows another ring; your absence pierces earth;
rising through the aperture, your sharp blade cuts the aging air.
At oceanside, my raven-coated lover stands, in tears;
we wrap ourselves around and around. My first birth.
I hold your absence. I mourn the Spring. I taste the withered pear.
The Shepherding Trees was first published in The Orchards Poetry Review, Winter 2025.
Crossing the Broad River at Turtle Bridge
So many crossings
I have made
and never have you
wearied of me
or all that I bring
my last breath
the last word I remember
the last song that I know
the last love that blossomed
like bloodroot
along my appalachian sorrow
And my soul is cast down,
O Lord
into depths
the rubble of contrition
born of ferocity and grace
waters which order
the taking and giving of life
the last word I remember
is no word at all
an exhalation lost
floating away in breath
misting
over this middle realm of river
color uncreated
I shall not encroach
the mystery
My parting breath
earth
river
the ongoing sea
“Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
Norman Maclean–A River Runs Through It
Wordfall
The ocean mist rises between your lines.
I wrap myself warm and fragrant
in silken syllables and
coriander consonants,
your patchwork syntax,
and laving wordfalls.
Speak to me in constellations
and I shall trace them
in diadems and diagrams,
for your words are stars to me.
They cascade in axial adjectives,
painting your feathered hands upon me,
as I strive to resist modifying the night
into something small and manageable.
Tenuous tenses float away,
and we are neither here nor there,
but between milliseconds,
pressed as a flower in the leaves
of a book,
our fragrance rising,
soon to vanish with the light.
Conjugate, love, this astral verb, spiraling galaxies,
let it slide through my gilded country, sparking flares,
until I am drenched by the rains of night.
From here the world is part parentheses,
wanting to enclose us, warm, in a furrow
waiting for a punctiliar preposition, when,
after all the loving, the words became
tangled, the conjugation confused,
the syntax unintelligible.
It became a language foreign.
A grammar unknown to me.
Yet your lines come to me still,
wrapped in the ocean’s mist.
Let us speak once more,
for it is ours for the trying,
together fashioning a grammar that hangs
from the evening’s watery lights.
Doors Carelessly Left Ajar
The sunlight is spilling out of the trees
tumbling along with birdsong
bargaining with the wind
to carry it in all its blushing joy
over raucous rivers
through whistling mountain passes
to him
where he may
or may not be
but here
in my cotton brushed dreams
where he rests
at his oaken desk,
in his oaken chair
Birdsong tumbles
out of my avian throat
my feathered heart pulsing
light
rushing
hanging in the trees
as does my sorrow
If he is only a ghost
come from behind
a door of my memory
carelessly left ajar
Time Indivisible
When the rain comes drumming
upon the summer roof of tin
drops numbering in the thousands
breezes begin unraveling
the curtain’s sash of rose
My body is undone,
inhibitions like torn buttons
falling unnumbered
to the floor
You weave
together the broken
hyacinth
casting
its healer’s fragrance across
our time—
and our time
is irrational
a number indivisible
threads of rain
hurtling on forever
into infinitude
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
–Wendell Berry
Gossamer Words
You are the rhododendron
blooming in the deepest
hold of my winter
I recall your words
gossamer
graveled
falling to my lavender pillow
how they still fall
down the echoing well
of decades
pebbles of remembrance
parting the air
as great drops of snow
outside my winter window
There have
been other voices
in other rooms
yet yours makes fine the memory
and unfathomable the loss
An earlier version of Gossamer Words can be found in my chapbook, Remnant Day, published by Transcendent Zero Press, 2023.
I Must Go Down to the River
I must go down to the river,
to see the lofty verdant trees bending
over the cool, black water,
and hear some bass, leaping there,
the rightful owner of that place.
It is a true blue day of dreams
and chickadees calling to one another
concerning their own dreams,
I suppose, of the supper
to be had. But they worry not,
for all is provided. The unfortunate
insect, some seeds, a berry,
a veritable feast. May they never
go hungry. The river runs
smooth as an eel’s back,
with hardly a ripple. The sun floating
on the water glints off the silver
backs of the baby gar, gliding faster
thana breath. The turtles, hiding
in the clear blue air on rocks
and pieces from the old, rusted rail,
still as the voiceless moon
on the rise, its quietude portending
a time our voicelessness will cause
all to fall into silence, a feathered thing
that weeps.
I Must Go Down to the River can be found in my chapbook, Remnant Day, published by Transcendent Zero Press, 2023.
Maybinton: An Unforgetting
On a forgotten town
Her skirts now scattered and decayed
in the dusty red roads,
a pale horse trots soundly by,
disappearing into the flashing dusk
that remembers women on porches,
bells on their dresses, mingling, jingling
change in the pockets of men, hot musk
with sweat, such a night as this, sex song and cricket song,
quivering bodies tear around the track,
stallions so angry they kick up stones to
crack the sky which will not give rain,
or prayers.
All of them left when the Madam died
and the horses preferred
the fire green pastures of the Lord,
a random stone still hidden painfully
in their hooves.
A few houses stand,
sashed eyes staring
at the trackless field,
the whinnying haunt
of the sure-thing gelding,
still quivering at the start.
A kickball bounces around
in the red bone streets.
A baseball diamond sits,
vines climbing its fencing
waiting for a pitcher.
On cricket song nights,
the heat moves in and under,
laving the air with sweat and musk.
Pieces ripped from a news paper
scuttle down the dusty road.
No one will bother.
The chalky reports will go on to scatter and decay,
beneath her skirt’s crowed evening lights,
unforgetting
Maybinton: An Unforgetting can be found in my chapbook, Remnant Day, published by Transcendent Zero Press, 2023.
For the Next Earth
Melissa A. Chappell
Selected Poems
Raise My Head
Darkness too long
upon me,
I must take its indigo
shreds into my own
furrowing wind
and tear it away.
I’ve been afraid
of the blackbird
that crows every
swarthy fear into being.
Daily he waits
on the fence
for a fissure in my
vulnerable strength.
The fear turns my
crimson flow of blood
from rivers to rivalries.
He comes and seduces,
then cuts me down
beneath the earth.
Yet after all these years,
I can hear a thundering beneath
this red clay earth.
It is the green fuse of life that
shall not be broken.
And I shall raise my head,
yes, I shall raise my head,
for the Lord is coming
through the summer wood.
Simple Light
A Poem written on Easter Sunday in Isolation
after an essay by the Rev. Frank G. Honeycutt
I awakened in a simple light
that fell across my shadowed room,
the tormented rudiments that were there,
and their razor edges, now gone.
Now just a simple room,
with room enough for simple words:
Blessed be the Beloved,
who has been here, alive,
with lavender on his breath,
and I, I have touched the
wound in his hand,
and this is how I knew him.
And this is a mark by which
you know me as well,
by my wounds,
my scars,
where I have been,
where I have died,
where I have been raised.
We see one another in a simple light,
the light of risen life,
as simple as the sun breaking over the tree line in the morning,
and settling down easy for a first Easter’s night.
LIke a fiddlehead fern I curl myself, and sleep in his wounds.
O Blessed be the Beloved.
Blessed be Christ.
After the Storm
On Easter Monday
I awoke to the wind
splitting the vernal air,
raging from the south,
the deep morning howling
like death in chains.
After it was over,
light was poured out
of a broken jar,
as is the most
precious balm,
I walked the yard
to see all that
had been broken.
Then I saw,
sturdily attached
to the limb of the
pin oak,
wound tight
with twigs,
some scrupulous
bird’s nest,
bound round in
perfection.
It had been
stripped of nothing,
by the stalking wind,
not even one twig.
I peered deep
inside its
hollow dark cavern,
and saw that
it was empty,
the jealous darkness
telling a story of new life,
somewhere,
heart racing,
blazing in song
across our wearied sight.
For the Next Earth
On the Consequence for Eucharist during Corona 19
They have taken my bread,
because of the devastation that has
thrown its shadow across this earth,
they have taken my bread,
and without it I am a shore without sand,
I am a river without stones.
Without it I starve,
fathomless my need.
The body of my Lord, riven in wheat,
risen from the soundless tomb
buried in deepmost night,
becoming common,
becoming ours,
from light to splendid light,
no longer contained by sacred walls
or the studied hands of pastors and priests,
the Christ is free as a fall of water,
a rising dove on the wind,
a heart more spacious than heaven,
yet capable of comprehending my lentil soup,
making his home in the salad from my garden,
allowing himself to be riven
in my ordinary bread,
and despite my careless hands,
despite their humility and dishonor,
the Christ, with grace undreamed,
is planted in the furrows of our heart,
a seed for the next earth.
Song of Love
On that day when I trespassed into your eyes
the cedars bowed their heads in contemplation
at the wonder, the astonished joy
that ran rioting through my veins,
to the sea of blessing
that we would share.
Quiet lay the winter,
as did our love,
yet beneath the holy unbroken crust,
turned the unquiet motions of life.
Happiness was ours the length of those days
as the silvered sun lighted
this space held by two.
Faith lay its hold upon us,
and we trusted that the coming parting
could yet be borne.
We sang through our pain,
and turned to one another,
when the green fuse broke the fallow crust,
and the Lord walked the blossoming fields of time
Small Graces
I sit down with my lute
of Western Red Cedar and Yew,
I mother it gently into my lap,
its curved back like the curve of the earth.
My fingers search the courses,
fumbling, breaking the melody
into fractious shards,
the undeniable broken strains
of the world’s descant ruptured,
yet dreams of wholeness
blossom in the spaces between,
dreams of daffodils and blue bonnets,
small graces, defying seasons,
blooming along this stony road
that is ours together.
For the Next Earth is available from both Amazon and Wipf and Stock Publishing House. It was published in 2021 by Wipf and Stock Publishing.
And I Shall Never
On the ecology of disappearances
And I shall never hear your carol
raising up the trees of praise,
who yet in green veils of mourning
sigh, so remembering you,
O little warbler, whose voice sinks
deep, disappearing into the sod,
and floats soundless down the river
of unanswering sky.
Nowhere and everywhere,
such silence is cacophonous,
confounding the bereaved wail
of the evening loon,
a cry more yearning
than the great gray geese,
in search of home
upon mythic fields.
And I shall never,
with feathered fingers,
caress his awned cheek—
the thievery of taloned years! —
yet his absence lies with me,
in the secret bed,
withholding nothing.
The Overtaking
The winged nymph alights
upon her greenly stage,
the blossom, waiting, trembling
before her rapturous sage light,
the dance ekstasis
of creature and nectar.
Sing, then the butterfly,
though such sweetness
she gathers, she cannot hold
the unbearable center,
for that grace which may
yet alight upon us,
overtaking us in slow,
tidal swells.
Countries Yet to Come
I came to you,
full of a psalm offering,
but you had gone,
winged away
on some slant
of afternoon sun.
I tended you,
with my scorned heart,
feathered mercies
in the nested cave
of my paperbox,
the unrelenting Yes
spoken true
against the world’s
default of the lifeless No.
You were born,
not for nests,
but for skies,
and I am to live,
not as one dying,
but as one yet born,
again and again.
Set this heart of straw ablaze
and the cinders I will scatter
in flight across the steel gray lakes
of countries yet to come.
At the Beginning of All Things
At the beginning of all things
I loved you
and only
as dusken thighs
of ribboning sky
circle ‘round
your vanquished earth
my rose
swan of death
glides into the lake
where currents are still
and stylite stars spiral
into a kiss
without rebuke
a night
that requires
no confession
the bread of our affliction
It was enough
for did we not perish
beneath the celebrant Sun
the spiraling sky
took you away
into worlds hidden
by revolutions
cities that in fevers
dreamed
other arms
that promised settlement
in a landless world
I am full of ocean
calling 5000 miles to her lover
Sink into what remains
sing and sing
as we once sang
the sheltered hill
of my grandmother’s fig tree
so ripe
was your mouth
the wine we shared
at the rail
of no-promise-unwoven
I grasp for all the light
I cannot hold
You pass like sand
I touch your coat
fraying
and only