First Things RSS Feed - Frederick Turner

The Odd Command

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400

My loved one sleeps and softly just respires,
A strange and intricate consort of cells.
Each does exactly what it most desires,
In love with all its neighbors, like matched bells.

Continue Reading »

A Bower in the Arsacides

Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

A hippie peddles jewelry
Beneath a poinciana tree,
A mother picks her daughter up
Backlit before an endless sea.

Continue Reading »

Missing Mass

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

My plane was late”I’ve missed the evening Mass;
So now I take a walk and try to pray.
The sky is vast, a dome of marbled glass
Where shoals of vapor slowly drift away.

The first few stars ride in the rifts of blue.
Again I wonder at the grand conception
That must have so intoxicated You
At the world’s indeterminate inception.

And now I breathe the atoms of the air
That Jesus gasped in words so long awaited
Since the stars shaped them in their fiery glare
To be the sound of “It is consummated.”

And this warm flesh that breathes God’s dying breath
Is no less of His substance, or His death.

Continue Reading »

The Legend of Saint Piran

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

They tied Saint Piran to a great millstone
And flung that good man in the Irish Sea.
But the stone floated, and he stood alone
Upon the Cornwall shore in victory.

The church he built was buried in the sand.
Twelve hundred years it lay there quite unknown.
And then a great storm fell upon the land
And washed the centuries from its grey stone.

Then the lost people of the modern age
Battered the stone saints’ faces that they found,
And so the keepers saved it from their rage
And buried it again in the clean sand.

I stand now on that dune, the church below,
And wonder if the saint will rise once more,
His spring, once buried, start again to flow
Where his stone floated to the Cornish shore.

Continue Reading »