Thomas Holahan, CSP
Contributor Biography
Thomas Holahan is a Catholic priest living in New York City. He has conducted poetry workshops in Boulder, Colorado and Berkeley, California. Often his poetry takes on the quest for the transcendent in the ordinary world, supporting the belief that God can always be found there. He leads a poetry collective and an email discussion group. He has recently been published in Listening and The Ekphrastic Review.
Chandeliers of Saint Paul’s Chapel
Shimmery now from subway tremors,
they hang, fracturing the light
of New York City in all directions.
Bought from the Dutch some two hundred
years ago, they disappeared when gas
succeeded candles
but made a comeback
with electricity.
Fragile yet tenacious, their facets
mirrored the Twin Towers’ end and
the ashy aftermath and
the glassy arrow point façade of
Tower One,
just across the street,
beyond the graveyard.
Shimmery from heartbeats, sinewy
from memory,
their lights
still burn.
To an Amaryllis
Some suffering came to you,
an early frost, a knife cut,
a fungal invasion.
Reeling, you began your long smooth
stem, knowing by rote
the way.
But flowering,
that immodest breaking
forth,
proved too much.
By summer’s end
you withered to the ground.
Never would I have known,
from that green stalk,
your troubles.
Some suffering had come to you,
an early frost, a knife cut,
a fungal invasion.
Fragile War
The materiel of war can quickly fill
an ocean, field or sky.
Its bulk and sometimes its
complexity all focused for impact.
Some objects can wait
decades to mistakenly
explode in a new school’s
playground.
Others easily slip from the air
when one wing flap
disintegrates.
And the silent machines propelled
through water must hold tight
not to sink.
Even entombed in museums,
dust and rust and the sun’s
unfiltered rays
age the means of war,
just as the thin skin of a soldier,
if not pierced by metal or
molecule, is withered
by the time it takes to live.
War Heritage Museum
Brussels, Belgium
When It Became Mine
This Christmas a friend sent me
a handmade card
with just a star on the front.
Inside it read:
For every searching heart,
a shining star
I hadn’t thought I warranted a star.
It was then
I looked into the sky.
Terminal
Blue plastic rosary beads
clutched,
dentures out,
thin from illness
she declares,
“I had a good life.”
Not my first
conclusion.
So I ask,
“What prayers do you
remember?”
What else
could she have?
“The Artist is Present”
—for Marina Abramović
there is a door
narrower than the ones
you know
there is a room
wider than
you can see
. . .
only the prepared
can divest themselves
completely
only the exposed
can reveal
every secret
. . .
the dream that suffering
brings
is holy
the place
where we are found
is sacred
the one
who passes carefully through
is redeemed
Dennis Yeo
Contributor Biography
In a career spanning over thirty years, Dennis Yeo has taught elementary, secondary, junior college and tertiary levels. He currently lectures at the English Language and Literature Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His poem, "The Statute of Liberty", was one of the winners in Poetry Festival (Singapore) 2017. His first short story, "Close to You", is in A View of Stars: Stories of Love.
Resurgam
Arms outstretched the second
the bullet pierced flesh, spilled blood
and dissected soul from body.
Wearing civilian clothes, he was
one of us, born of woman,
mortal, alive and capable
of dying.
His rifle, his sceptre, falls from his right hand,
no pain or anger in his tilted visage,
just submission to a higher plan.
The time was here.
The work was done.
He was finished.
We hide as it were our faces from this.
Who was he? Where is this hill?
Did it happen? Or was it all
staged so that those who believe
will see him
Living, not dying,
the moment eternalised
for the new world to see:
this falling soldier
as he fell.
Author's Note:
This poem was written based on Robert Capa’s famous war photograph, The Falling Soldier, which was taken during the Spanish Civil War. Spain and the Philippines share a common history in that the Philippines was part of the Spanish empire for three hundred years and was the sole Spanish colony in Asia. During the Spanish Civil War, Filipino volunteers fought for both sides in the war.
The photo appears to capture a Republican soldier at the very moment of his death. Following its publication, the photograph was acclaimed as one of the greatest ever taken, but since the 1970s, there have been significant doubts about its authenticity due to its location, the identity of its subject, and the discovery of staged photographs taken at the same time and place. Richard Whelan in This is War! Robert Capa at Work says that this is “a photograph that one believes to be genuine but that one cannot know with absolute certainty to be a truthful documentation”.
The insignificant death of one soldier takes on symbolic value. This resonates with the sacrifice of Christ on Golgotha. The event of Christ’s death remains one that is fundamental to our faith, though it is cast with accusations of fabrication and invention.