I want to say something funny or clever. But I can’t. This week, I bring you God.
In the context of literature and art, I find God peculiar. He’s as omnipresent in society as one’s faith might present him to be, but in literature, his presence is relegated to nuance.
My point is, here I give you God. Openly. Explicitly. Honestly. And maybe poems that overtly regard God are withheld from canonical texts because society’s cannoneers mean to tell us to crave nuance. All I’m saying is I don’t want to get in trouble for cracking a funny one at the expense of everyone’s faith.
Thank you, Jasmine, for a poem very full of imagery and honesty. And thank you, Chelsea, for your clever, anti- but ironically pro-Romantic Poe poem.


Jasmine Terrell
Undergraduate student

“Untitled”

When their eyes were watching God,
I wonder what they saw.
Did color suddenly fade
when the wind began to whisper?
When the clotheslines swayed and the grass too,
Did His voice break through?
Remnants of sound, they clatter ever so quietly
Resounding as truth, and leaving dewdrops at the earlobes
And fear froze as invisible precipitation in the air
Lingers as does desire, it pains as does loss.
Lift a hand, squint an eye, yet light still overwhelms
And Pushes past all empty attempts to stifle it.
With eyes fixed above, the world came and went.
It took the very life from their lungs
And love and time were no more.
In the eternity of their final moment,
In the darkness of uncertainty
While their eyes were watching God
Perhaps He was their light.

Chealsea Harbin
Junior

“World without Romance”

If I had been Romantic
Poe’s heart may have been mine
Perhaps I’d dance in caves of ice
On an opium trip through time
Or maybe I’d grasp my Sense of Self
Just a little too hard
Only to find that Illusion
Had caught me off my guard
For in the Spring I did walk
To visit the rotting tree
Next to your grave
Where the worms did play
Eating you gingerly
When in the clarity of the brook
Something caught my eye
In the shallows
I saw the shadows
Of myself within the sky
No visions of mystery
Did come upon me flocking
Nor did I kill a man
Later to come a haunting
Yet in that instance
 I felt a draft of insatiable stagnation
Had came upon the writer within
Imprisoned in isolation