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.
Hawk & Songbird
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.
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
