Tracy Lee Rittmueller
Honorable Mention 2007 Christian Publishers Poetry Prize $20
Tracy Lee Rittmueller lives with her husband in rural New Hampshire. She holds a B.A. in English Literature with a Creative Writing Emphasis from the University of Minnesota. Her poems have been published in Sidewalks, Rag Mag, Ophelia’s Pale Lilies, and in her chapbook, released by Heywood Press in 1993. She was Writer in residence in Minnesota schools where she introduced hundreds of students to the joys of creative writing. Now that her four children are grown, she devotes her time to praying, studying the Bible, reading, writing, cooking and gardening. Current writing projects include the completion of her memoir, My New Life in New England, compiling a book-length manuscript of new poems, and producing a multi-media curriculum for teaching poetry to high school students.
To Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo
From a country you never saw yet you explained,
because nothing under the sun is ever new;
From a woman you never loved however you pained
your mother and lovers, for I, a woman, too,
am body, mind, heart, spirit and wandering
Soul. I’ve watched summer’s various green-gold days
vanish with regrets, like all forgiven past.
I long to sing God’s sky-bright praise.
My soul has searched, word by word, for rest,
yet did not find the theme to quench my pondering.
My autumn has come, while millennia of ideas
failed to conquer our wretched communal pain.
I’ve read your words. Now you are gone. I’ve read Isaiah’s
and Moses’. Poetic tomes did not make plain
to me dark secrets written for my pilgrimage.
But now, I see. I need the Logos, uttered at the first—
not story, nor essay, nor argument nor thought—
You have shared, Aurelius, this consuming thirst.
It was the Light, the glorious Light of Truth you sought.
I, too, confess: The Word is the vessel of God’s image.
Copyright ©2007 by Tracy Lee Rittmueller