Recent Poetry, March 2026

Louis Armstrong  (1901-1971)

Few knew that
Your first language was Yiddish.
And few remember that stupid
Costume you were once made to wear.

I remember it, a jungle bunny outfit,
And your whole band had to wear those Embarrassing  charicatures  of African clothes.
But you played on, unembarrassed.
Your music transcending those silly outfits.
They became white tie and tails as we watched.
And few  knew that you were the
American Bach.

Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003)

 

You were the main Islamic Scholar when it

Was still unpopular, except in Muslim countries.

You couldn’t remember how many 

Languages you spoke,

But you were able to cut it down to three categories:

The ones for which you could lecture without notes,

(This included English, German, Turkish, Swedish)

Then there were those for which you needed some notes (I think this included Italian, Arabic, and Russian).

Then there were those for which you had to write out your lecture beforehand and read it to your students (this included, as I recall, Pashto, Urdu, Gujurati).

You were the great Islamic scholar, but you

Never left the Protestantism in which you were raised. Still the many people who met you at the airport in Indonesia, were all wearing buttons with your image on them.

Joan Baez (1941-  )

 

You showed what it was like,

To be a young Quaker girl with

A crystal voice.

Your activism was naive.

May I always be naive like that.

Mimar Sinan (1490-1588)

You were the greatest Ottoman architect,

With many buildings to your name.

Mosques, madrassas, hammams.

Your tomb is next to great mosque you

Designed for Suleimam the Magnificent:

But your real masterpiece is the breathtaking Selimiye mosque  in Edirne. Your tomb is not next to that one.

I first thought your buildings all looked the same,

Until I saw otherwise. They all contained the 

Same elements. But your genius was found in 

How you arranged those elements.

And how you dealt with them on the site.

You became for me the symbol of the humble artist, who bows down to everyone who came before.

Anton Chekov (1860-1904)

A lot of folks best memory of Lent,

Was of hearing you and your brothers sing

The trio from the Liturgy  of the Presanctified Gifts.

Though you came to denounce  the church, letting

Them all know how very painful that trio was for you. The deep insight of your stories and plays often involved that deeply flawed  organization.

St. Sergius of  Radonezh (1314-1392)

Yours is the sort of saint’s life,

I just don’t like.

Full of magic.

It doesn’t seem fair,

To those of us without that magic.

Immortalized by Nesterov,

The Russian Norman Rockwell.

Take away all the magic, and you see the Saint

Beneath it: one who made sure

Russia was settled with monasteries.

That, along with commerce, the warmth

Of heart was there.

Someone whose work becomes love,

And whose mind becomes pure prayer.

Taking all  the magic away, I fall in love.

St. Andrew of Crete (circa 659–712, 726, or 740)

The Great Canon, 

Is your most enduring legacy,

In it, we accuse ourselves of all the great sins history.

Even those we didn’t do.

I used to think it was just an annual downer,

But years of listening to it finally set me right.

It makes great sense. When we see there is no difference between me, God, and my fellow sentient (or non-sentient) beings, I am indeed responsible for every sin.   Sin being defined as anything that leads to non-communion.

Seeing what keeps us from that is pure joy.

Who did it doesn’t really matter.

Art

Even Vermeer thought it very cool,

The Durers considered it a very helpful tool.

The Camera Obscura helped them draw,

They were not draftsmen.  Many people saw.

Their art was seeing, in a certain way,

Though they’d take praise for crafting it all day.

Now artists can’t hide thus, and, as a rule,

So much more easily can they seem like fools.

Isaac Levitan (1860-1900)

Not knowing what to do with your vision,

They called you a Russian Landscapist,

And left it at that.

You were good friends with Chekhov,

Which makes perfect sense

As he was doing with words,

What you strove to do with paints.

I personally think you both succeeded.

And you both died young,

As if to teach us that life is,

About, though it’s embarrassing,

Learning to express love,

Any way you can.

Its length is only of secondary importance.

 

St. Xenia of Petersburg (circa 1719-1730–circa 1801)

You would have scared me,

If I ran into you,

At the Smolensk cemetery you haunted.

Wearing your late husband’s army uniform,

And insisting that I call you by his name.

Everyone would understand why I called the

Mental Hospital, to have them pick you up.

But you would likely also understand why I

Consider there to be two kinds of saints in that special category called fools-for-Christ:

The  ones who feigned madness,

And the ones (like you) who were genuinely, certifiably, mad.

As though to teach us that actual madness can be holy too. That our sanity and intelligence are nothing to be made something of. 

They’re all just grass. 

You understood that. 

It guided your life.

The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste (died together about 320)

Martyrdom simply means bearing witness.

Sometimes it requires death.

Sometimes it requires only

Compassionately holding the door,

Open for someone having a hard time.

And there’s a lot in-between.

Death comes only when the alternative is a lie.

Though you all died too young,

You came to populate my favorite icon,

And you stand for all those who bear the

Appellation “Martyr,” “Witness.”

Christ did not ask you to do something extreme.

Only to let truth (and all it leads to) be itself.

That there are forty of you is not insignificant.

Forty symbolizes the multitude of,

Witnesses there were in the

Early years of Christianity,

And symbolizes the many others 

Who also bore witness, like you,

Sometimes with a small compassionate gesture,

Sometimes by giving up life.

There is no way to know,

What will be required of you.

The icon: thirty-nine naked men stand on

A frozen lake, in the process of dying.

One takes refuge the warm bathhouse 

Provided for escape.

Seeing that one of them has taken refuge there,

And thus will  not die a martyr,

One of the soldiers disrobes, and joins,

The others on the lake, to bring their number,

Back to the magic forty.

Christ appears in the sky,

Sending down thirty-nine martyr’s crowns.

The fortieth is a bit separate from the rest.

It’s for the newcomer.

SS. Boris and Gleb  (986 and 987 - 1015)

Passionbearers, brothers, you didn’t even

Die for your faith, as martyrs usually do.

You died for the succession crisis that happened.

When your father, Vladimir, died.

But how you died makes all difference:

You kept your swords in their sheaths,

As the icon shows,

Making no effort to defend yourselves from the 

Brother, Sviatoslav, who really wanted to be tsar.

You were pacifists,

Like Christ,

Who understood that there was no difference at all,

Between you and brother

And what arises from that

Is nothing but Love.

Your own death or Sviatoslav’s make no difference,

Other than that it gave you a way to bear witness 

To what martyrdom really is:

A bearing of witness to what’s true.

Love.

We forget this constantly.

It goes against the grain.

Your canonization reminds us. 

Sudden Enightenment

At last the mountain is before me,

(It took a while) but now I see,

Still, it must be climbed, and yet,

That part’s essential. We forget.

St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359)

Even though you lived a somewhat eventful life,

No one in Thessaloniki today seems to know you.

You were captured by the Turks,

You were an Athonite monk of the Great Lavra,

You were the bishop of Thessaloniki,

You were a theologian.

If not for Fr. John Meyendorff’s work, we’d likely

Not know you at all.