Tag: haley

  • Poem: ‘Year of The’ by Haley Hodges

    Year of The

    Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord
    twenty twenty-four, year my words marched
    backward into my mouth and forward only
    when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler,
    year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of
    neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of
    our lady of fuck around and find out, year of pundits,
    year of Doja Cat, year of royal family tabloid drama, year of
    literal and figurative warfare, bloodlust year, year of desire
    year of frustrated desire, year of gradually excruciating
    guided identification of desires, year of my father
    unable to discuss that which is not the village
    council, year of the child, the laughing year of the wailing
    child, the domestic year, the exotic year, the year
    of everything turning to poetry, the year of poetry
    turning to nothing, the year of your turning to
    everything, the year of totality, the lost and found
    year, the year of the late bloom of the heart’s silent
    madness, year of attending to various screens, year
    of continual scrolling, the unchurched year, the year
    of tallying ecclesial Latin absorbed by the body, the
    pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua year, the irreverent
    year, the year of tabula rasa and later perceptions
    of time, the year of the timely year, the seasonal
    year, the calendar year, the yearly restlessness
    at the kitchen table year of annual infinity
    the year of the erotic diminuendo, the yearless
    pleasured year of self, the wanton year, the may be
    out after hours year, the year of slow staircase
    ascents, the year of our Lord not yet come
    again, the year lavished on a boy, the year wasted
    on a man, the unmanned barely manageable
    one-woman year of kitchen table restlessness,
    the year of being trapped in a word document
    the year of being trapped in a word


    Feature Image: Vlada Karipovich

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Belshazzar

    I never knew myself to have a Persian beard, now,
    This is odd, this will need some explanation
    So too the crown and concubines and all these
    Half-drunk vessels from the house of God
    Isn’t it 2023 or 2022—was I not, just now,
    Pulling up in a Subaru or whatever it is I
    Get myself around in? In fact I’m quite certain
    My father was born in 1959 and hardly Nebuchadnezzar,
    Though it is his second term as village president
    (He ran unopposed this time) for the Most High God
    Set him over it. TEKEL

    Says the writing on the wall of my lordly mind, haunting,
    TEKEL—you have been weighed in the balance
    And found wanting

    God I am always wanting
    Wanting wanting wanting I am
    Always wanting in or out of the balance,
    And there is no wisdom in these Chaldeans
    I have summoned to advise me, these useless
    Fuckwitted Chaldeans with parlor tricks who break
    My words with sticks and hurt me thus. How many more,
    (I wonder!!) how many more misdeeds before my kingdom
    Is divided, and given to the Medes?

    Feature Image: Rembrandt‘s depiction of the biblical account of Belshazzar seeing “the writing on the wall

  • Advent Poem by Haley Hodges

    Advent

    We have endured long in the dark.
    It is a burden (A magic? A madness?) particular
    To us. Long endurance of darkness is not light,
    But speaks of a belief that light’s radiance
    Merits enduring long in the dim we know—
    In the dusk we are.

    The world is a bone
    Full of Christ-marrow; its sun a merely
    Mortal star, spending itself to lighten
    What it can, just as the Godman upon
    Entering our long dark did, except
    In his mortality—no mereness.
    He will put flesh again on this
    Old bone, the world, his own
    Milk-fed flesh in the great
    Stable dark, a holy darkness:
    All the void
    Is not.

    This is, and has been,
    And shall be.

    What Mary treasured up
    In her heart was Death
    Leaving the carcass of the world
    At his arrival. She treasured up
    The world alive, all alive
    With a brightness
    That turns the noble sun
    To pitch.

    Feature Image Advent and Triumph of Christ by Hans Memling, 1480.

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Faking It

    When Cleopatra rolled
    Out of the rug, she thought:

    Don’t worry! Even if
    I do not enjoy your performance,
    You will enjoy mine—a lot.

    I’d like to credit myself
    As an actress, but the truth
    About men is: I’ve yet
    To meet one unwilling
    To believe he is a singularly
    Exceptional lover—yeah, baby.

    I am your captain aboard the Beguile,
    Cruising down that long denial
    With no wish to make things
    Worse by undeceiving
    You—mm, hail Caesar
    I offer half-lidded eyes and
    All the right sounds at all
    The right times and rely
    On the fact that truly
    What you pay close attention to
    (Unduly) is yourself. You’re watching
    Me, but it’s astounding—genuinely—
    What you won’t see, though you should—
    There, right there, that’s good.

    Charming, cunning queen, lay the tracks,
    Set the stage and land the scene. He’ll believe
    Because he wants to—oh, I want you
    And yet you’ll wish that you’d stayed home—
    It wasn’t worth the trip to Rome.

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Kyrie 

    Rotten fruit, rotten root. Hands up
    Don’t shoot. Kyrie eleison.
    By the waters of Columbine, of
    Blacksburg, of Newtown, by the
    Waters of Parkland and Uvalde,
    There I sat down beneath my desk
    (Don’t shoot) to weep.
    Christe eleison. My soul to take.
    Kyrie eleison. My soul to keep.

    Gloria 

    There is no
    No utterable Gloria
    In excelsis Deo—there is
    Only the unutterable.
    There is He, qui tollis
    Peccata mundi, but also
    He that brings them, and
    Brings them so
    Unutterably.

    Credo  

    “Of all things visible and invisible
    The rifle is king. I believe
    In one gun, in One Gun Almighty.
    How fast can you run?” Thus
    Spake Death, and these, even
    These are the conditions in which
    Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

    Sanctus 

    Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus
    Dominus Deus Sabaoth!
    And precious in His sight the
    Little children He bid come.
    Stop of the mouths of your
    War machines this hour—
    Strike them dumb. Let
    Heaven and earth be full
    Of their silence, lest every
    Hosanna perish in violence.

    Agnus Dei

    Agnus Dei, who takes away
    The sin of the world, what
    Can it profit the Most High
    If you take our sin but leave us
    To die? Miserere nobis. Lord
    Of the cellar, (hide!) Lord
    Of the attic, let it be mercy
    Falling semi-automatic.

    Dona

    Dona nobis pacem.
    Lead us beside quiet
    Waters, no more to bury
    Our sons and our daughters.
    Peace. Grant us ceasefire.
    Grant us peace.

    Feature Image: A memorial set up outside Robb Elementary school for the victims of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, US.

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    The Sacred Mundane

    1

    We might say with confidence that the world
    is a lovely catastrophe—paradise
    buried in a rubbish heap; devilish, angelic,
    perishing, precious, priestly, proud;
    one home to the light that is oil and the water that
    is darkness,

    this poor dazzling Earth a jar cracking
    with the strain of their dueling dual containment,
    each repelling ceaselessly the other, each true and
    each toiling, warring for truest.

    Us? We sip from the strange chalice
    of these shocking simultaneities. The draught
    makes us dance, and weep, and worship
    and slay, and curse, and kiss, and pray.

    2

    This rainfall spends and spends itself
    on the ground that can only receive it,
    and my thoughts spent with it are hardly
    a poet’s thoughts – I wonder is there anything
    else like rain, and decide at last that nothing is,
    but the conclusion makes me think
    in this regard rain is like God, and have made
    myself a paradox.

    And then I think of your second name,
    a challenge, fierce in its declaration
    ‘Who is like God,’ and fiercer still
    in the silence that is the only true answer,
    and the rain falls steady with my unsteady
    thoughts; they are paired today in a dance
    strange and tuneless, and breaking
    over me like a jar of perfumed oil
    is the thought ‘I get to be here,’
    and the cosmic unfathomable voice
    of the rain says this also, and with
    the same measure of delight.

    3

    I passed the Dairy Corner on route 7–
    it was evening and a storm had
    begun in earnest and without apology,
    yet the Dairy Corner stood neon and unblinking,
    oblivious, resolute beneath relentless hammer blows
    of rain. I can’t say just why,
    but it warmed my soul to see the people
    (and these were not oblivious)
    huddled in a merry mass under the insufficient
    awning, drenched with their sundaes and cones,
    who–perhaps without even intending to–
    counted it all joy.