Poems
HARD THINGS HAPPEN. What happens to faith?
Pandemic at full tilt, the diagnosis came—blood cancer: multiple myeloma. This book is not about anger or why. I am interested in the durability of faith. These poems ponder the way life & death fly above us, circle us, heckle & intimidate, exhaust hope. It’s about what we have—and what’s left. Lord, is this what you call presence?
Loss has no presence. It reveals presence.
I call it a walkabout, the way one navigates treacherous unknowns; one must keep moving to survive. Is God absent? Look around… Coyote, hawk, songbirds, the cat hit by a car, the starry host watching from afar, these stayed with me when God was silent…or was he…
WHY? I began as you might…Bewilderment. Abandonment, Fear, Sadness, Exhaustion. Doubt hammered me. And yet. And yet…God was there. In almost imperceptible degrees I understood God’s immense unwavering presence. The essence of courage.
FOR WHOM? Everyone’s faith is tested. You, dear ones, going through or been through hard things; people of faith, lost in the chaos; caregivers, there are notes for you. Friend, may find yourself in my questions…and the answers…
TAKEAWAY… The takeaway? Oh of course, that God might allow you to know him in hard things, even in his silence. Have courage! To know his presence: nothing, no nothing, made me so glad to be alive.
“Keep eye contact with these poems. Susan Cowger pioneers the lamentable animal wilderness of suffering and reports back with language that coheres where there seemed only incoherence. Cowger conducts the passage through the ambivalence and confusion of pain with great care, such that, as we attend to these poems, we discover ourselves to be loved and tended well by both the poet and her Lord.”
-Matthew Clark, author of Only the Lover Sings
“A book of flight, dive, trill, and shriek, Susan Cowger’s bold and riveting collection on cancer, Hawk and Songbird, takes away our breath and then infuses us with Spirit. These luminous poems brim with birds and tremble with omnipresent Coyote. Yet, in the midst of ‘animal pain, ‘ the poet also howls love of family, friends, and the Divine. Even in ‘darkness / darker than the darkness / of before, ‘ Cowger’s necessary words rise and soar.”
-Marjorie Maddox, author of In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind
“Master word-crafter Susan Cowger gives her readers ‘permission by example’ for asking hard questions and living into them for answers bigger than words. It takes courage to ask and courage to receive the reply, but the asking and receiving is worth every moment of the conversation. As a seasoned and gracious sherpa, Cowger companions us into the greater unknowns faced by every mortal who hopes to live well and love deeply.”
-Lancia E. Smith, publisher and executive director, Cultivating Oaks Press
“With equal parts transparency and generosity, Susan Cowger scatters her verses like birdseed to nourish the reader who marvels at the call and response of faith despite the roving shadow of predatory illness. This isn’t just seed for the feeding, but also the planting, ‘as God’s promises run after us all / with a spade’ to turn the hard soil of our hearts and help us see afresh that ‘Being alive is a gate made of pearl.'”
-Bradford Winters, showrunner and poet
