"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
While we were corresponding about a promotional campaign for his new novel, The Conjure Man, author Peter Damian Bellis shared some of his evocative, earthy poems with me. He's kindly given me permission to reprint "God's Anvil" below. I loved the idea that God might do His transforming work through something more grounded and physical, and less glamorous, than the "sweltering winds of my beliefs".
God's Anvil
Today I am spread thin across God's anvil,
my soul withering in the bellows of his breath,
my body melting, merging, the dust of
my purpose mixing with the desert of
my hope until I am one of the many
obsidian-like shards half-buried, hiltless,
in the blood-dry carcass of this once fertile,
crescent earth, mirror to the shimmering,
sweltering winds of my beliefs, yet also the dark-
heaving ripple of the camels as they settle
into the sand, indifferent, unimpatient,
unwashed, impervious; and the stench of their
dung-heavy breath washes clean this mirror,
leaving now a cloudless, distant, sheltering sky.
River Boat Books, publisher of The Conjure Man, is offering a contest with good-sized cash prizes for essays responding to Bellis' novel. Check it out here.
