Franz Wright explores the possibilities and the challenges of religious life (and its relationship to poetry) as almost no one else writing today. We often meet him in church, as in this poem from the collection Wheeling Motel.
My Pew
I love this
window
way in the back
in early gentian morning
down which light’s long
labyrinthine whispers
reach my ear, I
would like to describe it to someone,
to myself, my blind companion—
Why did I turn to this
forsakenness again?
Are You
just a word?
Are we beheld, or am I all alone? And
as that little girl on the psych ward
recently asked her father,
When I am very old
can I come back
home, and
will you be there?
Read more from Wheeling Motel
Also recently published: the paperback edition of Wright’s Earlier Poems