Misery and mercy coalesce
script into something like light a lamp
now trimmed to a single ray
Let’s just get this out: poetry was meant to be read out loud.
Your dog will love you for it. The cat’s tail may twitch depending on how often you look up. Plants just take it all in and grow.
Poets are generally miserly and exacting in doling out their words. Yet, if they write well, the reader does not pull back to examine the form. One will hear rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration but will be enticed by the echo. An echo sets up an emotional template that resonates off memory, off history, and burrows deep inside.
When the reader hears the echo, the poem is doing its best work: evoking truth inside you.
Slender Warble
A nose-to-nose encounter with God, would be blinding. Thankfully for now, God is invisible. Yet this too perplexes believers. Seemingly absent, his promised presence becomes, at times, a black hole into which prayers are shouted, a field of gravity so dense one wonders how love embodies the core.
Have you been there?
Mostly, we shrug and go back to life.
And perhaps that’s how it begins, no more than a chirp filtering through the noise of life; a snatch of birdsong that makes you sit up, cock your head, and hasten to the window.
Perhaps, the song was not only made for you, it was sung to you. A small nudge from Him.
I tremble putting nudges into words. The presence of God reliably resists being pinned down. These pages explore universal humanness, challenges that break us, that save us. Through them may He himself elucidate the Warbler in ways you could not guess.
Publications
Read some article/poems: Here are a few links to publications.
Scarab Hiding
“With her keen and uncanny ability to capture our most human moments, Susan Cowger’s Scarab Hiding portrays the frightfully delicate journey of facing the death of a family member—both through courage and the unglamorous ache of those who survive. With lyrical deftness and the unwitting details of authentic experience, Cowger’s poems do the paradoxical work of presenting the beautiful and the painful in a gleaming instant so the the reader too can ‘go ahead, give the silver / kiss…find that / tree with your coat on, the only place left / to hold the cockles of your heart.’”
~Susanna Childress
