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[ with 3 poems by David Poston from Letting Go,
Fernwood Press, Newberg OR © 2026 ]
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Disobedience
To think about God is to disobey God.
—Alberto Caeiro
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For a few moments each night before I fall asleep,
I lie in my bed and think about God,
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about that old God-with-Thunder calling softly
to young Samuel in the night,
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about Elie Wiesel rebuking that God or his betrayal
on a flame-licked night at Auschwitz.
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One theologian says the Enlightenment led to Auschwitz,
while an open window led to penicillin,
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but what led Fleming to bring forth penicillin
from a moldy dish but his mind,
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the same mind that imagines monkeys typing Hamlet?
Who could have imagined children in America
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caged by lockdown, watching a red-blooded American
storm the Capitol in a Camp Auschwitz T-shirt?
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Though I was raised to dare not think of disobeying God,
Wiesel showed me questions are belief’s ripening,
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and I want to ask what Jesus wrote in the sand before
he looked up and spoke words that made a mob
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drop their stones and walk away one by one, oldest first,
leaving him alone with the shamed woman.
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Each Gospel describes the feeding of the five thousand, but none
count the children or their mothers quietly providing.
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Alas, poor Hamlet, when you shuffled off this mortal coil
where were the women to mourn for you?
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I’m not Samuel, though I’ve spent time as child and man
alone with my questions in a lonely bed,
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but alone or not, like the boy Samuel, I lie here each night
and listen until I fall asleep.
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David E. Poston
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❀ ❀ ❀
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She, Being Holy Ghost
. .
Past Rock City and the cattle on a thousand hills,
broken trees poke through the gray wool
of the late-winter mountainside waiting for
rapture to seize the dogwoods below them.
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Stones lie scattered like pillows in whitewater
bleeding out into the calmness spooling
under the footbridge across the Davidson,
where trout float all day in the shadows,
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facing upstream toward Pisgah, and beyond,
the backcountry called Shining Rock,
thick with bears. And she, being Holy Ghost,
is neither hawk nor wind under wing,
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is not turn of leaf in laurel thicket
nor any of the thousand shades of green
shadowed by clouds rolling over balds,
nor any shadow passing swiftly across the land.
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She is not bear or scent of bear,
nor chill prickling the hiker’s neck at
seeing the hunched shape too big to be dog.
She is not the pause between the spondees
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of the quickened heart nor the synapses
firing muscles for flight. Not the dimple
in the water where the mayfly lands, nor
the shimmer of the rising trout.
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She is neither baby’s cry nor moss on tombstones,
neither the darting nor the dimming of eyes.
Yet without her, there is no telling.
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David E. Poston
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❀ ❀ ❀
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questions are belief’s ripening . . .
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There is a huge imagination at work here. At work and at play. David Poston casts his net wide into the sea of human experience and draws it forth sparking and squirming. Culture, literature, music, art, the shining fish that define and enlarge us, all are schooling within these poems. And most of all religion: faith and doubt, questions whose answers have come unstrung and drift away while we chase after them like gossamer from a dandelion. Will we discover new answers to take their places?
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As I read page by page through Letting Go, its world opens before me. It meanders and climbs, it explores and discovers. In my conversation with the poems and the poet, I ask myself what I have let go, and what I must yet let go. The faith of a child – will it lead only to emptiness and despair, or can there still be a wellspring of joy in this angry world? People I have loved – can they still live in my heart? In the book’s closing poem, a trapeze artist lets go at the apogee of her incredible graceful soaring. In complete trust, she releases. What comes next? No, don’t ask, live only in the beauty of this moment if you can. Live for a moment in the beautiful precision of lanuage, the poems’ grand imagination. Live in poetry’s welcome invitation to the next question, and the next.
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Something Beautiful
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Last month,
as the Fourth of July barrage
dissolved into the night
and people around me
gathered camp chairs and blankets
for the slog through everyone’s trash
back to their cars,
I stood there in the dark
waiting for one more
bright flowering
I knew would never come.
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Now, lying alone
just before dawn
waiting for the Perseids
to flare across
the edge of sight
as the sky begins to pale
behind a rumple of mist
where the dark lake waits,
I shouldn’t worry about
which faint streaking
will be the last.
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I’m remembering
my ninety-year-old father
bursting into laughter
at the Dairy Queen
as he ate a banana split,
and what was so funny to him
was the sudden thought—
he said this—
that it might be
the last one he ever ate,
and what could I do
but laugh with him
and remember later
that he was right?
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David E. Poston
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❀
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David Poston’s Letting Go is available from Fernwood Press. David grew up in rural North Carolina and still calls the Tar Heel State home. He has received awards from the Writer’s Workshop of Asheville, Charlotte Writers Club, and Southeastern Writers’ Association. His poetry and book reviews have appeared widely, including the NC Literary Review, and he is a former editor of the anthology Kakalak.
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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– Bill
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P.S. Here's a little thing I wrote in response FISHING LINES Any moment might be the last as these lines…