SALLY THOMAS

Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry collections: Motherland, which was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award, and Among the Living, also from Able Muse Press, forthcoming in 2024. Her debut novel, Works of Mercy, appeared from Wiseblood Books in 2022. She is co-editor of the Paraclete Press anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, which received the 2023 Book Award in Culture and the Arts from Christianity Today. As associate poetry editor for the New York Sun, she shares the writing of a weekday Poem of the Day column. The mother of four grown children, she lives with her husband and dog in North Carolina.

in the courtyard

A coal fire thrummed and murmured on the darkness.

Its shiver lit a crowd of human faces,

Cold-pinched and dirtied by its licking shadow,

And by their hungry waiting for the something

About to happen that was bound to happen.

Behind the heavy doors, the hidden voices —

No one outside could hear what they were saying,

But only how they rose and fell. The stranger

Who warmed his hands among them tuned his hearing

For that one voice he would have recognized.

He listened, too, within himself, half-hoping

To find, again, some echo of his own voice,

Exhorting — something — in the mountain starlight,

Mere days ago. Or centuries. He’d thought, then,

That heaven would ignite its temple fire,

And all the earth would rise on wings of incense,

While prophets spoke with prophets in bright shadow,

A shuddering of glory. Tell no one.

Tonight he felt he dreamed these faces, voices.

The wrong firelight kept flickering through gardens,

This most wrong garden, filled with such wrong faces —

No one familiar, only a confusion

Of avid voices fastened on him, asking.

What could he think to say? I do not know him.

That clarity had been his. All that vision.

Now — startled, in the dark — he told no one.

Read more of Sally’s work in Solum Journal Volume I and Solum Journal Volume IV.