Courting the Ineffable — Fully into Ashes by Sofia M. Starnes
The following poem, “What They Never Knew,” set back in time to Verspers on September 10, returns to a more-opened Mystery:
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Theirs, also, the unwarned: the brave benevolent — p. 51 |
Death is the threshold over which faith dares to peer. Fittingly, several poems in the final section touch upon death, including two lovely elegies, “The Scarf” for Starnes’ father:
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We’ll walk into a liturgy, for a while: of a dress… — p. 69 |
and “The Armoire” for her mother:
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Listen to the wish-wind mazing the wall, where she nods, smiling. on lifeless things; she leaves them for us. — p. 71 |
The final poem, “A Way through Words,” turns its back on all that has preceded, all the particularizing, the words, the various separations that constitute our earthly existence. It is in the form of a prayer, a response to Psalm 19.
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After our histories of speech — harangues in song and stammer After the tidying up of prayers, Heart, at the first, to flick the sediments of sound away, as one would sweep — p. 83 |
And through the silence, the “One murmur,” there are
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….voices racing to tell us what things are like. By rumoring, we raise the dead. articulate as childbirth. — p. 83 |
So ends this particular faith odyssey. Starnes writes frankly, passionately within a Christian framework, always taking her faith as a given. But over and over, she pushes it into the realm of Mystery, the only nexus possible to faith and art.
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