by Mother Macaria Corbett

Voiceless as a rock, listless as a stone—  

Far below the hidden waters lathe the karst   

Into a limitless wonder, abode of my Lord.  

How can there be honey from a rock?   

The desert bee gathers the secret gold   

Pollen too small for eye to see—  

Nectar turns into golden liquid,  

Accumulates to feed the little monks  

Busy with their prayers.  

My prickly pear with its stabbing thorns   

Finally blooms amid the weeds   

Each flower a miracle of yellow and red  

Dies to make its fruit and seed   

Eternal Creator’s art ephemeral   

Heaven’s Beauty resting on a moment.  

The heat which holds me within walls   

Still draws out the flower toward the stars  

 This sickness cannot limit me.   

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mother Macaria Corbett has published a chapbook with Anaphora Press, Endless Winter Nights at Monks Lagoon and been featured in a collection by the same publisher, Myrrhbearers. She has published in a variety of journals, including, more recently, St. Katherine Review and The Handmaiden. She published an earlier chapbook in the ’80s under the name Deborah Corbett, before becoming an Orthodox nun. She edited Epiphany Journal for about five years, after serving for fifteen years on its review board.  

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachel Singel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville. Rachel grew up on a small farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013. Rachel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, and Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia and will continue her research at Proyecto’ace, an Artist-in-Residence Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Summer 2021. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private, public, and museum collections.