“For Jeff, on the Anniversary of His Death” by Richard Spilman

Richard Spilman

FOR JEFF, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH

We have come to the point

where death will sever

what once made us whole

and what may be has not

yet announced itself.

You have gone before

to scout this new world

for those of us afraid

there might be more

than just death, and life

after, that in fact

what we have known

so knowingly might be

only part of the story,

the rest as amazing as

the shock of a bomb

hidden in a bouquet

of flowers given on a

street corner by a veiled

girl with beautiful eyes.

You have gone before,

you have taken her gift,

breathed the scent

of her flowers, lost

yourself in her eyes.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

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Richard Spilman: “We all have faith—faith that the garbage we leave at the curb will be picked up, that the patch on the right front tire won’t blow on the freeway, that the air we breathe will satisfy our lungs. But faith in God is something entirely different—embracing not only the insubstantial but the nothingness that precedes all creation. Kierkegaard compared faith to jumping off a cliff, but it’s not nearly so dramatic or (thinking of Wile E. Coyote) so comic. But it does require, on good days, the ability to live not as if the world were transformed by my internal vision but as if I can be transformed by the inner heat of a world that, even at its most magical, is never what it seems to be.”