Absalom by Adam Smith

They say your hair was long,

as the years are long in passing;

and memories are long

and stretched thin,

like too little light of a gray dawn.

You remembered every wrong

as you sang a marching song;

and where have all the good men gone,

can you reach them, Absalom?

I remember when you stood there

with the yellow sunlight on your face.

And I forgave you, as I forgive you,

but you, Absalom, you forget no wrong.

Your heart grew like the roots

of a gnarled – of a twisted –

patriarch oak. And you never forgot

even when the earth had forgotten,

but you became rich and black like the soil.

And blood!

Did blood stain your long dark hair

and seep into the conscience of the land?

Did Abel cry out? Did the cattle cry out in horror,

the horror of uncivil war?

But still I forgave you, as I now forgive you,

though you, Absalom, you forget no wrong.

They say your hair grew long,

and they say the branch grew low:

the branch of the oak tree in Ephraim,

and that you hung in the arms of Father Oak

when all your foes surrounded you.

Then they lowered you into the earth

and you stained the soil red.

They covered you,

and they buried you

as if they were planting a seed.

Above the din of empty war,

and above the battle’s dying moan,

rose from the poet king’s raw throat

not an elegy, but a cry:

“My God! My God! My son is dead!”

Promised Land by Abby Bean

The weaker, the weakest.

We left our hearts in Egypt.

Our sandals encrusted with

Blood, and dust,

our hope with rust.

Our faith the kind

That shapes minerals into idols,

Melts gold into mold,

strikes rocks, and holds

its tongue.

Our wonder is our worship,

And our doubt shouts

From the lips of our enemies.

We close our eyes to remember

The living burning –

Open and realize our turning

Away.

Our wander is our war

For the Promised Land.

Analysis of Dover Beach by Sara Blum

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, 1867

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straights; — on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and crease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach is a poem mournful and somber in tone, almost like that of an elegy[1], but with the personal nature of a dramatic monologue. The poem begins with naturalistic metaphors full of sound, describing the beach at Dover in the moonlight: “Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,/Listen! You hear the grating roar.” The beach is empty and lonely, with only a hint of a light that “gleams and is gone.” The seashore at night painted by Arnold in this poem is a dark, melancholy scene, giving the poem a smooth but brooding tone.

The remarkable thing about this poem is that each formal function of it consistently identifies with sea. Arnold’s words roll slowly into each other, like waves breaking on a sleepy shore. The third stanza employs a series of open vowels—“Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”—creating a verbal flow and roll through assonance.

Even the shapes formed by the uneven lines in each of the four stanzas reflect the image of waves reaching and retreating on a shore. There are a variable number of syllables in each line, as well as an uneven amount of lines in each stanza; the first stanza has fourteen, the second six, the third eight, and the fourth nine. The meter is also rather unpredictable but seems to follow a general iambic pattern. With the irregular amount of syllables per each line (they range from 6 to 10), the meter won’t be pinned down as simply pentameter or tetrameter.

Not even the rhyme scheme of Dover Beach is consistent; the first stanza (abacdbdcefcgfg) is a jumble of rhymes that, at the moment they seem like a consistent pattern, jump into a new sound. The second stanza, considerably shorter than the first, is a little tighter in its scheme (abacbc), with its first four rhymes mimicking that of the first stanza (abac). The third stanza (abcdbadc), however, shows no coherency at all, its rhymes stretched over several lines. Finally, the fourth stanza (abbacddcc) seems to be toying with the idea of forming into a Petrarchan sonnet[2], but quickly changes its mind, coming to a stop as neither an octave[3] nor a sestet[4], but with qualities of both.

Arnold is also brilliant in his use of alliteration; it is neither too heavy nor too light, but naturally flows mimicking the open sea gently swelling. The sounds of this poem are smooth and watery, pushing against the irregularities of its form. In the first stanza Arnold uses the “g” and “l” sounds in “Gleams and is gone,” reviving the sound in the following line with “glimmering.” A few lines further down in that same stanza, he alliterates “l,” “s,” and “m” in “sweet is the night air! /Only, from the long line of spray/ Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, /Listen!”

In the fourth stanza Arnold writes in a list, underlining a series of denials: "…neither joy, nor love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;" The repetition of “neither…nor” also seems to mimic the constant beat of waves washing onto a shore. Moreover, waves beating on the shoreline seem to be the only true constant in this poem, again pushing against the erratic rhymes and syllables. This “turbid ebb and flow” of the sea in the second stanza, however, also draws in the melancholic tone into the poem, reminding Arnold of Sophocles’ musings of “human misery.”

From the poem’s formal structure to its themes, the sea is the most prominent image and metaphor. In the first stanza, the sea “meets the moon-blanched land” and the waves “draw back and fling” the pebbles onto the shore, bringing the “eternal note of sadness in.” And in the third stanza, the sea becomes the “Sea of Faith” which “was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore /Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. /But now I only hear /Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, /Retreating, to the breath…” This waning sea of faith suggests change for Arnold, possibly religious change; indeed, something that was once full is now emptying and retreating.

how to fall in love with a vacuum (to Augustine) by Betsy Brown

I ran by the river

and thought about God,
and about how my nostrils
and eyes and ears and tongue and fingers
are all teleporters--
I crawl inside one of these warm flesh elevators,
press a button,
and BAM! there I am,
on Planet Love.
and it's constant climax there in my bright pink spacesuit,
I can jump a mile high
and pick the planets out of the sky like peaches,
and drink the dripping juices
'til it's a mad, mad, MAD teaparty of Love.

I ran by the river
my ipod pulsed with Colombian hip-hop,
and I LOVE the sultry Spanish sounds a can't understand,
how my eardrums shiver,
and a South American summer rains in my brain,
and I love it because I hear it,
I HEAR it

and what about God,
this three-letter word
He
sounds like the wind in all the films,
a giant James Earl Jones explosion,
a Lion King looming, booming among the stars
this God,
the painters paint Him a Santa-Socrates hybrid
sculpted from cumulus clouds,
white beard waving in the wind,
watching.

so I laid in the grass and listened and looked
for this booming white sky-God
but He was not there,
and I reached out my arms to embrace Him
but my arms slid through air,
I climbed into my ears and eyes
and nostrils and fingers and tongue,
and pressed the button,
but when the door slid open
I did not find God on the other side.

i've never known a Moses,
a man whose skin touched God's skin--
so I sit in a chair I can feel
and I smell and taste the apartment air
(like candles and hard-boiled eggs)
and I touch a friend's hand
and I listen to the cars drive over the manhole on 6th avenue
and I try to love a vacuum.
--Someone clearer than glass
and quieter than sleep,
empty, but full,
untouchable.

I ran past the river
and thought about God,
and listened to Colombian hip-hop,
and ran and ran and ran and ran and

ran

Neglect by Danielle Perkins

This is what we call

Neglect.

It is ugly. And it is dark.

This is what we call

Regret—

When arrows miss their mark.

Junior Danielle Perkins is the scholar of the the house of Queen Elizabeth I. She enjoys living, simplicity, and photography. She also wants to live forever in Neverland.

Flying by Alex Sciaretta

From my window seat, I watched the propeller break the thickness of cloud that had momentarily embraced our aircraft. When we first took off, and the plane’s nose brazenly lifted off the runway, I was overwhelmed with a sense of humanity’s arrogance. How could we think our feeble hands and numb minds could clumsily meld metal and plastic, enabling us to invade the night sky like this?

Yet I was flying. As we gained altitude, I lost my sense of perspective, and the ground below me moved slower and slower. So slow that once this flimsy capsulation of man’s pride breached the cloud cover, all sense of motion ceased. I was left with the slightest queasiness in my stomach that betrayed movement.

I grabbed onto and sucked the nanoseconds after the breaching. For it was then that my existence was in the plane’s propeller (which whirled until its edges became tickling feathers or splayed paintbrushes) and in the crescent moon (which peered, bemused, at the oddity of the flying humans) and in the clouds beneath the flying craft (which alluded to the rising and falling chest of a loved-one under a down comforter).

Although I did not see us move, the crescent soon passed from my view, and the blanket-cloud was slowly pulled aside, revealing a landscape of what appeared to be illuminated bubble wrap. Each bubble had its own electric light bulb, and they just begging to be popped, to have their light spewed across the city blocks, dazzling locals and tourists alike. But the plane clamored evermore upward, and soon the bubble wrap was transformed into a myriad of diverse seed beads, all glued upon charcoal asphalt and begging my fingers to touch their texture.

And how I wanted to run my finger tips between their ridges and feel their round tops on my palm. But I had to let them go, for I was flying from New York City to Roanoke, where another seed bead garden awaited me, one memorized by my hand, one that I hadn’t seen in three months. Roanoke—as I flew, I wondered whether I would ever call Roanoke “home” again. Yes, there the seed beads intimately familiar, and yes, when someone asked, “Are you going home for the holiday,” I always replied “yes.”

But in truth, I didn’t know where home was.

Just a Moment in Time? by Ed Gruber

Is each second just a moment in time?

Or is it something else?
As we followed the Oncologist out of my little brother’s room we were prepared for the worst.
He put the X-rays up for us to see.
There was a small area at the top of one lung. It didn’t look like much.
“The cancer has metastasized to his lungs.”
Five seconds.
Five moments in time.
“It doesn’t look very big. How will you treat it? Radiation, chemo or surgery?”
Nine seconds.
Nine moments in time.
The look on his face and the cracking of his voice hit like a sledgehammer.
“That small area at the top of the one lung is the healthy tissue. The rest of his lungs are full of cancer.”
Seven seconds.
Seven moments in time.
Unendurable sorrow. A complete loss of sensation. Vertigo. Shortness of breath.
“What kind of treatment will he have to endure this time? He’s been through so much already?”
Six seconds.
Six moments in time.
“There’s nothing left to treat. He only has days to live. I’m so sorry.”
Eight seconds.
Eight moments in time.
Four shattered lives.
Eternity.

Ed Gruber is the Facilities Manager at The King’s College. He loves riding and fixing motorcycles, working with youth, and eating twice as much as he should.

A Magical Gift (On Anna's 10th Birthday) by Robert Jackson

Below is a little ditty I penned for my daughter's 10th Birthday, when I gave her a promise ring. She's a huge J.K. Rowling fan--read the entire series 5 times through!

I know your love of Potter's craft

will help you understand

the special spell I want to cast

by giving you this band.

For dark arts do, indeed, exist

to mar and turn the good

from doing all that goodness knows

it can-and, yes, it should.

So, with this ring I offer you

my pledge to be your Dad,

and teach you every spell I know

to help you fight the bad.

I'll walk beside you, as you grow,

giving all my smarts

to ready you with incantation-

just like old Hogwarts.

Now I bless you with this band,

and you must solemn-swear

to give your life to Magic Pure

and Truth, my Princess Fair.

Dr. Robert L. Jackson is the associate professor of English and Education at The King’s College. He is married with four lovely children, and it’s been said that he is somewhat in love with Robert Frost.

Untitled by Amy Leigh Cutler

I took the Lord's supper tonight;

the body and blood of Christ
has never been harder to swallow.
I waited in line and when I dipped
my bread I heard,
"Partake and live in freedom."
The words shook me to the core.
My face twisted, fists clenched,
jaw tightened.
I've been drinking too much.
Keeping my body around
to keep from getting lonely.
I've been waiting for
the law
to sew itself onto my chest
in red.
Let them all see your shame.
I didn't think the cost was too high.
Failure after failure;
a slur here,
kiss there,
smiling all the while.
Waiting for the law to strike
bright through me,
paralyze me with the weight of
my own inadequacy.
"Partake and live in freedom."
I've been trying to sew myself back
together.
I paint shame on my face
and laugh away the weight of what
I know is coming.
I'm naked,
manic,
and waiting,
but no one wants to throw the first stone.
They are waiting for something,
not sure what.
Throw the fucking stone-
I'm guilty.
The ones who raise their arms to throw
were the ones who touched me last.
I don't meet their eyes.
"Partake and live in freedom."
My eyes are squeezed tight
to keep the dirt out.
No one throws.
The stones are falling
but I'm guilty.
In the middle of my sin.
I've made no effort to change.
I didn't ask for mercy,
but the men are gone
and He's telling me
to live.
The body and blood of my Saviour
has never been harder to swallow.

Amy Leigh Cutler is an alum of the King’s College and a native New Yorker, born on Staten Island. She recently published her first book of poetry, Orange Juice and Rooftops, and the book has already made it to the front of Barnes and Noble. Check it out at: http://www.amyleighcutler.com

Numbers by Abby Bean

It's about time I speak of You again...

Master of mathematics,

Add, subtract, divide

the number three, repeating.

You are a black whole

divided into so many peaces.

The smaller You become,

The larger You become, to me,

The greater You become.

Creator, You become, to me,

Daily, daily, daily.

You are

Divided into so many pieces, and

I try to reach into the center

of You. But these

Spirals are my rivals,

and the more that I unravel

You, the more that I

Unravel. Unrevealed Revealer,

I revel in Your mysteries,

I hum celestial symphonies

And grow amongst Your trees.

I glimpse the surface

of Your holy waters, and

Find in my complexion

the reflection of You.

I am content

with Your infinity,

and find myself satisfied

with my finite mind, divided.

Infinity,

the number three repeating,

Fractalizing Father,

Wholly Spirit,

and a Rising Son,

Three in One

Defies Your natural laws

with such an order

that Your self-contradiction is

the only truth,

Your fiction is all that's true.

You, multiplied,

In Suns,

In earth,

In water,

In a tree.

In Adam and

in Abraham,

and me...

Alpha and

Omega,

You have been,

And are,

Infinity...

Abby Bean has been scribbling verse on scraps of paper since she was eleven years old, covering such topics as mathematics, tree frogs, cities, and the sacraments. She writes in pursuit of God and believes poetry to be a precious form of worship. She will keep writing as long as she is searching, which she hopes will be forever.

Love Was Never the Reason by Holly Hall

Our fingers still intertwined,

Gracefully, smoothly, elegantly.

Our voices still raised high,

Harmonies, lyrics, rhythm.

Our hearts still beat fast,

Passion, pulsating, breathing.

Our eyes still met,

Understanding, wondering, knowing.

The lies ran off your tongue,

Slid down your body,

Off your skin, and into your shoe.

You stomped on them.

Stuck on the bottom of your sole,

Stretched each time you picked up your foot.

You stepped, you walked, you hopped,

You skipped, you talked.

Your words stretched

With the lies

As you placed your head

Upon my breast.

My fingers

Ran through your hair,

Comforting, consoling, smoothing,

Speaking words to you.

The salt stuck to your cheeks

As it never had before.

It is still there.

You will not dissolve it.

Dissolve it

With real tears, purified tears.

Your eyes

Have lost its color.

They are no longer

The chocolate that melts

With the warmth

Of your smile.

They are black,

As cold charcoal

That has been left

For too long.

Too long

To be the same as it once was.

Put it back in the fire,

It will fulfill its purpose.

It will warm, burn, create again.

My chest will not rise

Or fall with yours again.

It will rise and fall alone.

A heart behind it

Building up better than before,

Brick upon brick,

Wiser, older, smarter.

It was fighting alone

All the time,

But now it is aware.

Now it is aware.

Selfish, indulgent choices

Blame them for the cause.

Love was never taken from us.

Love was never the reason.

Holly Hall hails from Nashville, Tennessee, home of honky-tonk and sweet tea. One of her life goals is to be a thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail, which she plans to accomplish in the next few years. Holly graduates as a Business Management major from The King's College this December and hopes to stay in the city to pursue a career in music marketing.

Twin by Rosie Jonker

When we were young we lived near an air base.

He taught me how to tell the planes apart
Just by the sound they made: I recognized
A-10’s, B-52’s (which always sound
As though they’re crashing—eeee!) when they flew by.
When we were young we fought. I’m older, so
I guess that I should really be the one
Who’s level-headed, self-controlled, mature.
But I am not. He is. This made me mad,
And, vicious, I would throw things at him—toys,
Or Legos, or whatever was nearby.
When we were young I didn’t realize
That he is just an antimatter me,
A living, breathing Jekyll to my Hyde,
Who holds grudges, fears germs, and likes mustard.
There was a three percent chance of us. We
Were split right down the middle. We are rare.
I finish all his sentences because
The things that I would never do or say
He says and does. I think that since we spent
The first nine months of our lives in one room
Together, we have to be friends. We are--
Like light and dark are friends, or hot and cold.

Rosie Jonker is a sophomore in the House of Truth. Believe it or not, she has a twin brother. She hates olives. And her favorite shade of lipstick is Maybelline #425.

Journey for Two by Tanisha Fanney

You make me feel like California.

Like palm trees and sea breeze and dry heat
Like West Coast streets and summertime beats in Cali.
You make me feel like home when it’s 2713.16 miles away
So let’s just take this moment and make it last all day,
Put our heads together and dream the moment away….just you and I.
Let’s go back in time to when you were the Pharaoh and I the Negress by your side
We’ll sit high on our thrones and watch our ebony kingdoms thrive…just you and I
Back in Mother Africa.
Let’s find a dreaming tree and sit beneath its shade
We’ll strip the clouds of their shades of gray
Make them passionate purple and line them with gold
Then autograph the sky with cursive rainbows.

Let’s intertwine our minds so deeply that our souls become pregnant and give birth to angels.
We can borrow their wings and see where fallen stars go.
We can find out what it feels like to kiss on a cloud, get so high on each other that we never come down.

Let’s rap, you and me, let’s intellectually flow
about Jesus and Judas and days of long ago
Let’s you and me spit about all of the classics
how Dickens and Twain ran away with the page
Let’s rhyme about how Dunbar and Hughes could take the brightest light
and recreate it in black on lines of white
Let’s freestyle a dope verse over a hot beat about political corruption
and international conspiracy
I’ll murder the beat box if you kill the lyrics,
Spit me a verse about what your deepest fear is
I’ll speak a spoken word and you can just hum,
while I recite my dream of seeing Jerusalem.

We can take a walk down my memory’s path; my past is yours to share
And later we can stroll barefoot around your future so I can leave my footsteps there.
Let’s hold hands so that your lifeline crosses mine,
we can lie here all day and re-define time.
I wanna play in the recesses of your mind,
cuz bein’ fascinated with you is my favorite pastime.
I want to stare into your eyes so deeply that they suck me in,
And while I'm there I’ll drink from your tear ducts so you can never cry again
Pull me close so I’m overcome with your sweetness and all the bitter pain in my body is relieved,
as we lay here all day and creatively pick dreams,
Or lie here in silence, when I’m with you there is no need for words, you can read my mind.
I am yours to whisk where you wish, all of your desires are mine.
You are the king for me, and I the queen for you,
so let’s travel together, this journey for two.

Freshman Tanisha Fanney hails from Oakland, California. She has won several poetry awards and was the senior editor of her high school literary magazine.

Of the Mountains By Annie Clark

There, the river -- dancing down this valley
with lacy caps on every lazy eddy--
it simply streams
through teeming reams
of florid stone and bone till, ready!
flings itself off mountains with a yell.

See there, the scree, the mountain's bleeding knee,
an open sore with pocks of shattered stumps.
The lichen drips
and rips and tips
and tumbles in a burst of greeny lumps
to feet, thrust deep in doleful trees.

Look, those trees, the closest-knit of families
to every living breeze held sturdy captives.
At night they sigh
and cry at the sky
in the silvery light the moon, generous, gives,
and through the bars poke fingers toward the stars.

Far away the fires fill every flickering valley
then come, dashing on the flashing wind...
the learned yearning
of pithy burning
sears the captive family and pauses, pinned,
as stars release the rush of summer rain.

Annie Clark is a sophomore in the house of Susan B. Anthony and is from the beautiful state of Colorado. She would love to teach philosophy someday, which is appropriate because she is married to Leo Tolstoy.

Hymn #2 By Eric Bennet

She lifts her skirt

and my hymn begins.

Our holy harmony

sings itself in lips, thighs

and blessed hips.

We hum our doxology

with eyes closed

feeling the divine

in the slow rhythm

of our sacred sex.

“Sweet Jesus,” she croons.

I bow my head

and whisper, “Hallelujah.”

Amen.

Eric Bennett is the Dean of Students at the King’s College and lives in New York with his wife and four children. He loves trees without leaves, the silence between songs on vinyl records, and beginning sentences with the word “and.”

Seasons by Adam Smith

I

Spring was still the first of things.

Timid bulbs grew shyly on the trees

stirring in the iron earth.

And birds returned to their branches:

redbelly robin flew first to scratch the soil.

The sun shone sallow in limpid air,

though night watch hours were over.

Yellow daybreak grew bright and bold,

and daffodils adorned the country passing,

self-indulgent in these growing times.

And to grow, to be green, and to bloom

was always the way of things.

April rain brought resurrection,

and May the happy dancing days when

sunlight shone through greenwood leaves.

II

Summer was life in simple splendor,

holding you close in heavy heat.

And the noble corn grew straight and tall

as tomatoes ripened on the vine

fat and red in the fullness of things.

The forest groves were dark and cool,

and full of midsummer mystery

so we understood our mothers’ tales

of fairies and dryads and magic on air:

there’s shape to the world without us.

The world turned slowly in those days

and we were glad for greatness then:

content that truth be truth after all,

we embraced the unknown, clung to faith,

and gloried in our childlike ignorance.

III

In harvest time the air fell crisp

as red and yellow apples from boughs

whose leaves were bright with fading fire.

And we were full of fire, too:

embers glowing in our young eyes.

Then the first frost came; the grass crunched

underfoot and the sky was full

of flocks flying to southern shores.

The trees all lost their summer leaves

and settled down to slumber.

We lost in us our fire’s heat

when we formulated the heart of man.

Because we were afraid of night,

we lit new fires to light the road,

and now lie down to torment.

IV

To sleep, to slumber, and to dream

all through these everwinter nights

is the practice of all living things

but us and the evergreens, shivering in snow.

We cling to Christmas hope, and live.

Our Yule logs burn and then grow cold

and Christmas is only once a year.

We wonder if our sleep is

hibernation in the heart of the hills or

something new – something strange.

The skeletal trees grasp the winter sky

that is gray as the cold barrow hills.

Our days are brief and calculating;

but in the morning, snow has fallen

to say “Behold, I make all things new.”

Freshman Adam Smith comes from Annapolis, Maryland. When not performing his duties as the father of modern economics, he likes to listen to folk and classical music, walk in whatever woods he can find, and read the collected works of Robert Frost. His favorite poet, however, has got to be Wendell Berry.