Poetry
(December 2000)

Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 108 (December 2000): 16, 26.

Baptism

Water from you
will quickly fill
my deserted soul,
which withers, until
it meets with my eyes
and, reaching their rim,
gives ocular proof
of a tropic within.

—Patrick Lee Miller

Optics

Black is no color
and all of them.

White is all colors
and none of them.

So it’s simply
a matter of reflection

and absorption, prism
and paper, prison

and sentence.

—Gilbert Allen

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