Poetry

Poetry

Dia Calhoun Poetry

For Adults

Dia Calhoun writes eco-ecstatic and other poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Nashville Review; The EcoTheo Review; GRIST: A Journal of The Literary Arts; MORIA Literary Magazine; forthcoming in The Amethyst Review; and others.

Her essay Two Roads to the Ruins: The Dynamic Presence of White Space, co-authored with poet Deborah Bacharach, was published in the February 2023 issue of AWP Writer’s Chronicle.

Her poems are included in the anthologies And Blue Shall Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine; SPIRIT, an anthology by White Stag Publishing; and forthcoming in Thin Places & Sacred Places by Amethyst Review this summer.

For Children:

Calhoun has written two contemporary verse novels for children, After the River the Sun, and Eva of the Farm, a Hornbook Magazine Best Verse Novel.

Links to poems by Dia Calhoun:
The Once and Future Storyteller
Fire Broom
The Handmade Life

The poem below is published in The EcoTheo Review January 2021:

Backyard Cathedral Kit

Step One

Sweep compost of your midnights
into flowerbeds.
Spiral paths to the center
to entice the improbable bee.
Building a garden to see the Something
you have never seen before
is living the Alleluia.

 Step Two

Train your passion in chapels of roses.
Plant bell towers of lupine,
poppies to strew red petals
in the wind of the unseen.
Preparing for the Something
you have never seen before
is living the Alleluia.

Step Three

Raise the altar, a fountain splendoring
questions in a blue water-bowl.
Halo with sunflowers
to light whatever water divines.
Waiting for the Something
you have never seen before
is living—  

wind roars
red petals fly
fountain sings
a blue hawk
grips the water-bowl
eviscerates your chest

your heart falls
raw
inflorescent
seraphim-eyed
beating
on the ground     

is the Something
you have never seen before—
your heart bared unto its angel
the Alleluia peering up at you.

Dia Calhoun