Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2026
Psalm For Our Time, poems by Stephen Haven.
Psalm For Our Time
Yes, Father George Zabelka
Blessed Fat Man, Little Boy,
And then he cried, My God
What have we done? Hibakusha
Forgave him at the shrine.
Then they asked him to genuflect
On the vassals of their sins
Even as civilians. Pearl Harbor?
Nanjing? Please help us never,
Ever forget! Then someone
Brought up Dresden, the Battle
Of the Bulge, the Babi War
Ravine, not to mention,
Ever since then, Auschwitz,
Nagasaki, and our wars
Without end. Lord, may we
Never say amen, may we always,
Always find, bloodied
On that shrine, the broken
Architecture of our time,
One scraper still standing
Like a man girding his face up
With one hand, love that never
Saps the artifice of innocence,
Fingers sowing crumbs
While each stray dove
Snaps a wing, flaps in the mud.
Free Swim
Just why we swam buck naked at the Y no one ever
Enlightened me. Men and Boys’ free swims,
Weekly lessons, in the buff we dove in,
The lifeguard the imperious exception. Whenever
We asked the girls, for them it was always otherwise.
No one ever gave such favor to our testicles
Floating in water. One winter Saturday, our bums
Burnished glazed clay. General Patton inspected
Our exposed positions. Lined up against the wall,
Near the deep end, we thought we might have to
Spread ‘em. Sour in the water, someone’s turd
Still floated. One boy cried for his mother before
The disgust our loined leader barked at us. Yes,
There was a darkness in that free license imposed
On us. Locker-roomed again, we tucked it all
Back in, dodged a forced confession. Now it seems
So strange, passing tests from Minnow to Fish
Without a stitch! No girl ever laned up a stroke
Ahead or behind us. Was there ever even a bit
Of innocence in this? Even my father found
A joyful freedom in that suspended animation.
We never talked about gender stratification.
Still, I have learned my lesson. Now my wife and I
Love to bob our lives. We lean toward open water.
A quarter mile out, no swim buoy tethered orange
Around our ankles, what magnifies in the pond
Plumbs also the clouds above. But there is an earlier
Liberty that still cradles me: When I step away
From the forms that hold me, I like to give the boys
Free reign, float ‘em in the fresh, or, warmer yet,
Jellyfish a southern ocean. Did the ladies miss
Out on sophomoric this? Only my wife will say
When she unhooks the girls after a dog day
If such a burst of reminiscent wonder
Still treads for her in that abandoned pleasure.
The F-Bomb Takes Flight
The rich boys punched, pivoted with the poor.
The poor lost their jobs a year or two
Shy of their pensions. Arson flourished
In those canyons. Still the textile mills
Graveled in the lots. Some machinists
Never drove, always walked. The doctor’s kid
Smashed a curve ball spun by the janitor’s boy,
The model son masked in the mass
Of his rebellion. Buzzers blasted
Each dark dawn, called everyone to attention,
Shifted or gave back some of what they’d lost.
Each August hit the hole, hard and low,
With utter abandon, cracked the shins
Of a running back, loved the contact.
Everything the town once taught him!
They snatched it from a widow’s porch.
It tasted like perfume his mother wore
Out of bounds through an oak front door.
A case of Ballantine’s. They drank them on
A backyard court. They offered up F-bombs
He could never quite muster. Because he wouldn’t
Say them, just as his father never taught him,
Always they mocked him. The ale was warm
In his zipped bag. Against a savage world
His father never barbed him. As if his friends
Might wake to it like a shot he bricked,
Over dark rooftops he belched and let one rip.
Wounded Hawk
We eyed him from our high back porch. Plump on a low
Fat branch, he bobbed our full attention back. Yesterday,
Small birds ganged on him, flipped him to a damaged wing.
Down to sandy soil, he cocked his walk and they went
After him, and still he managed with great effort
To thrust himself back to our tallest pine, then came
Down to this low branch. All afternoon we heard
Small alarms that warned, without compassion,
What with the way he once ate their young.
As he pitched his cry from that diminutive space,
We thought we might be interpreters: No mercy,
No justice in the world, as he sang
A sharp, shocked outrage with the state of things.
Or more simply, I am hurt here, or I am patched together,
Or things are not well with me on Earth,
As Rilke says so beautifully in The Book of Hours.
We felt for him the way we did the feeble Senator
Who in his own silence lost himself in the camera,
The poor old man who cast his afflictions
On the nation and came finally to his own dark wood
And for whole minutes uttered not one word
While the country heard
A hawk crying in the stab of its own wound
Calling out the lack of mercy, no justice in this world.
Hold’em After Mass
In the hole he aces his high hopes again.
Then the sinkhole of the Flop. Considers odds
He might be flush again. Then the Turn
Flips to the River’s quick. The broken lifeline
On one palm? A calloused finger
Traces it. No truck with God holds him all in.
Don’t bet on it, the priest once schooled him.
© Stephen Haven
Stephen Haven’s fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was a finalist for England’s International Beverly Prize for Literature and was published in 2025 by Slant Books. His three earlier collections are: The Last Sacred Place in North America, selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread, winner of the Ohio Poet of the Year prize; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize in the final year Levine served as judge. Twice a year-long Fulbright Lecturer at universities in Beijing, he has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Djerassi Foundation, as well as five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Literary Imagination, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Asheville Poetry Review, Salmagundi, The American Journal of Poetry, Arts & Letters, The Common, Blackbird, The European Journal of International Law, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, Image, Western Humanities Review, World Literature Today, and in many other journals. For more details, see stephenhaven.com.