Petrarch had his Laura, a phoenix feather for his pen. Danté's blessed Beatrice sent him to hell and back again. Rilke's heart-sick panther. Burns' wee tim'rous beastie. None tremble with the thrill I feel whenever you retweet me.
Category: Poetry & Music
Burning Bush
This bush is on fire, and we have misplaced god.
Dear Copyeditor,
I am writing you this poem the way a gazelle must grow ever sleeker and quicker to escape the indelicate jaws of the lion.
Another
Crow in a birch tree shakes rain from its wings...
Young Female Writer’s Lament
Why is everything I try to do coming out stilted and slow today? I blame you. The general, faceless you. The you who keeps telling me I need to be smaller, wittier, brief.
#WritersResist: Bring the Fire Down
Move. Between justice and mercy, between nakedness and warfare, between all that you would not do and all you have done, unknowing...
New Moon, Forever Maiden: Wild Worship in the Digital Age
We live in a time of amazing opportunities and heart-wrenching tragedies, a time when many of us live daily with the humming tension between wild enthusiasm and deep cynicism. Women in particular face challenging contradictions in this brave new age. In a society that celebrates equality, we see before us endless opportunities to pursue our dreams. And yet in many ways, the glass ceiling seems thicker than ever, and the balancing act of gender equality forever remains a perilous one.
Holy Adoration: Fire as Prayer
Sometimes what I want is a wild fire. A fire that roars. A fire that beats at the air with its bright fists clenched. Sometimes I want prayer like a fire that claims everything it touches.
Goddess Withdrawn
It takes a long time to understand why she left. She'd arrived one day with a burst of rain, a glint of sunlight on wilting ice. She'd come with mud and wind and trampled dogwood petals pressed into the cracks of the sidewalk, with quickened breath and light, with the smell of cheap wax candles burning well past midnight... And then one day, just as quickly, she was gone again.
The Wrong Kind of Poem
Today is the five year anniversary of my first date with Jeff, and the two-and-a-half year anniversary of our wedding. (Which means that, from this day forward, we'll have been married longer than we dated. Weird!) Recently I was looking back through old journal entries, when I found this poem that I wrote back in March 2010, one year after we'd met. As the French say, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Happy anniversary, love!
Alison Leigh Lilly 