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The asters bloom amid late-summer heat, / Low-lying stars that will not linger long / And bend their sprays beneath the year’s retreat. / How shall we weigh such goods against such wrong? ...

So gradually, it seemed, the way / Things pass: the ice cube in the glass / Disappears in a pool of grey; / The bright bud’s stem fades into grass. ...

They rise above us, arching, spreading, thin / Where trunk and bough give way to veining twig. / We cannot find the place their lives begin, / But know it spreads beneath us in the deep...

The Divine Comedy: InfernoBy Dante Alighieri, Translated by Jason M. BaxterAngelico, 260 pages, $19.95 Jason M. Baxter, author of A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Introduction to Christian Mysticism, and The...

John Stuart Mill once proclaimed that the modern world exemplified an “age of discussion.” The public square, open to all and free of coercion, would serve as a forum...

The land is all alight with Easter colors, / Tulips in pink and orange bending over / The clumps of daffodils just past first flowering. ...

Silent, the loft of desert air      That bears the first invaders in Thinks nothing of those sleeping where     The daily slaughter will begin,Nor of the rifle-bursts of prayer. ...

When my wife and I moved away from the Midwest some fifteen years ago, we began an age of perpetual homesickness. I’d tear up at the sight of Notre...

It seems a silly thing, an object rather / For study by the great pathologists, / That anyone should live in fear of Eros...

A number of years ago, I published a poem in First Things called “Autumn Road.” Although the brilliant and changing colors of the leaves begin the poem, the explicit subject...

Busy with many things, I know you are, / And watch you turn away and close the door. / I see it in the way you drive your car...

The snow this morning falls on brook and rush / In great flakes wending slantwise without purpose, / The sky above a wakening tent of grey. ...

When we encounter the beautiful, it always surprises us; it overtakes us and turns us around. So it was with me, as a boy, sitting in the pews for...

Helen Andrews’s insightful and hilarious Boomers has gotten me thinking about the whole idea of generations. For as long as I can remember, I have been averse to the...

This woman, cast in bronze, / Lowers her eyes upon / An infant on her lap...