Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Cameron Alexander LawrenceSeptember 06, 2018

The Chattahoochee at dusk, low in a drought
summer. Cicadas humbuzzing the living branches

our smoke rises through—fire of twigs and storm-
fallen timber, kindled now by cardboard

take-out containers and a dog-eared magazine.
One by one, I rip the pages and let the heat

curl them, a glossless wrinkling into gray that once
told or sold—it no longer matters in the ash

and I like it that way. Until I catch an ancient name
captioned beneath the photograph of a peninsula:

Ayion Oros, Mount Athos, a holy fortress
protected by the Virgin herself, so the men say.

The first to burn is a shriveled monk, his long beard
a white wilting feather. I watch the bell tower melt

down to dust, the domes brittled into breeze.
I linger on the site of a cliff-built monastery,

Simonopetra, poised on the edge above roiling sea,
where the monks learn to lean over death

with lump throats swollen a little less each day.
As the fire cracks into conversation, dying light spits

toward the moon. I try to imagine separateness
from the world, what it is to wear the silent

spaces of dead men’s prayers, a dark cloak
woven from nine hundred years of singing.

I warm my hands over memories not mine—
singed frescoes; the fathers like struck matches

in choir stalls, their klobuks embers lifting
into woods, disappearing. These signals

speak to some distant ship passing between
doubt and belief in me, each page a song

chanted by combusting licks of tongue
about a God above all desire and happiness.

What do these words even mean? They vanish
like smoke from the mouth’s long O.

Correction, Sept. 7: The title of this poem has been corrected to “Burning Mount Athos.”

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
Ellen Peck
6 years 10 months ago

Thank you for publishing - a very lovely and meditative poem.

The latest from america

Pope Leo XIV has appointed the French archbishop of Chambéry, Thibault Verny, as the new president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. He succeeds Cardinal Seán O’Malley, 81, the emeritus archbishop of Boston.
Gerard O’ConnellJuly 05, 2025
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks with other members of the House July 3, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington after final passage of U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping spending and tax bill. (OSV News photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)
“Deep cuts” to SNAP and Medicaid will “inflict real suffering on these families…. SNAP and Medicaid are not luxuries, they are lifelines for millions of children across our country.”
Kevin ClarkeJuly 03, 2025
It was one of the first times Leo has spoken unscripted at length in public, responding to questions posed to him by the children.
The Vatican has named the judges that will preside over the trial of disgraced Father Marko Rupnik.