After Things Fell Apart: five poems by Sarah Tate

hazy sun, image by Maarten Brand, on Pixabay, modified

December Morning

Which glacier melted here

to water the grass with glisten?

Oh, the light is thin, watery,     

the wilted glow of old age.                     

Somone has separated the beams           

like seeds. We’re left with

the quivering lips of winter                    

to ease us toward ever deeper sleep.

The light, weak-kneed, ill at ease,

as if shining at all comes

with a price, as if the sun

must trust God’s unseen

hands to lift its tired body

to the sky at dawn.

The sunrise throws its bitten

seeds on the gloss of the pond,

no doubt wanting to be sown

on the frozen water as the ice pleases.

And now I’m thinking of starlight         

on the snow, cold in its razor glow.

How possible light is when

our breaths breathe out worlds

and we’re waiting for the silence           

to change us, for the stillness

to remake us, in this wild air.

                      *

What Seems Like Revelation

It began with a shadowed

listening in a ring of beeches,

yellowed gentle by passing time.

Light flows down to me—

every moment is a shocking

loss of reality, which means it

must be newly, daily, discovered.

I watch the willows by the lake,          

the fog in the aspens, the shimmering 

wet on the pines.  

but you will find great                                 

truths, springing like light

into the backs of your eyes

The world will go on as it is,

grass green, sheltering frogs,

spin and whirl of planet dance,               

chirps of crickets in the countryside,

if you listen to God

whisper mystery in your ear,

and listening is almost the answer—      

like discovering the softness of marrow

beneath cold, hard bone. Like breaking

to find all the colors in the stones.

                      *

After Things Fell Apart

Ah, yes, it’s a sad world now,

stranded between hilltop and Heaven,

the clouds a smolder of mortal shapes.                        

This must be the price we pay for experience.

I mean, letting darkness examine us

because we’ve played with shadows and apples.

But the sun rises in the morning,

the haze holding it, the fragile silence as slender         

as a grass blade there in the eternity before dawn.

Never has this star of the world been so silent,

so cold or deep, never the spring so distant or mute,

never the sky so ill-green as before a storm,                

but in the morning, clouds still stumble

to the horizon like the dead from their tombs.

                             *

Light, Where There Was No Light

Just last week, in the city,

I walked in and out of streets

because people there

chatted on the stairs.                    

When I came home,

I had nothing of my own

but this body of dry wood.

I longed to hear it,

what they said on the stairs,        

why they laughed or cried, 

held hands or smiled,

simply to be a part

of that breathing body.

I ground soot into my skin,

along with hymns that were        

salt in the cuts of the hurt

because I wanted great love,

wild, tsunami-like, as wide

as the grass, endless as the sky.

He found me like a slow

seepage through my bones,

in the city, where the shadows

were faces made from ash.

I am ready to come back

even though the scars

still burn in the wind

and the milkweed

that grows near water

still smells like the river.

None of it will be graceful,

but His voice rings as strings,

like the music itself

is the mercy of God.                    

                *

In the Life of Things

Maybe heaven is in the fumes of tea,

tinged slightly with sugar air.

In the yellow glow of lights

at the edge of autumn’s smoky days.

Maybe its shadows

are dollops of sun through the trees,

even coffee stains on the table—

where children teethe on its corners,

where knees grow swollen and stiff

as afternoon approaches dusk.                     

Like we accept

the rumpled fists of a newborn,

we must also accept clocks

that brood at the end of dark hallways,

summer storms

that blow open the screen doors,                

and the clot of dark-clothed mourners   

under churchyard maples.

After a while, the amphibious flowers

will drift farther from shore,

like they were tethered

only gently to this earth.                            

Heaven, no doubt,

is a star in broad daylight,

if you ever thought to look up.                

Sarah Tate is a writer, a poet, and a lifelong student of literature. She loves

to explore the innate connection between her Christian faith and poetry and

believes God often reveals His eternal character within our everyday experiences.

Her work has appeared in Solum Literary Press, Ekstasis, Heart of Flesh Literary

Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Partlow, Virginia, where she enjoys long walks

and contemplating things she doesn’t understand.

September 2025 issue