by Tina Quinn Durham
Eighteen years of praying, and still
no spark of blue-gold flame spreading
its wings in my husband’s heart;
my son’s schoolboy mouth angry
and hot, full of sitcom insults
with the white icing of humor peeled away;
and my oldest son insisting
he doesn’t believe in You.
Would You become more real if I told him
I haven’t forgiven You for the body
of my niece dressed in white lace,
pretty as a birthday cake in its sealed box?
Would You become more real if I told him
that I doubt because of my father’s lymphoma
and I want, more than anything,
to die without waking, to finish
the fall to the ice-limned bay where waves
pound a steel pier and the music of their breaking
rises more insistent than any human song?
Tina Quinn Durham is a poet, artist, and musician living in rural Arizona just north of Mexico. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and has been a poetry editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review and Sandcutters. Her work has appeared in Creation, The Christian Courier, Heart of Flesh, and elsewhere.
header image: Untitled (2025), copyright Kairos Photography.
2 Comments
Bridget Donohue
Wow. Very moving and kind of scary. What if truthfulness, rather than certainty, is what makes faith real?
Abbey C von Gohren
Whether the answer is YES for me depends on many things. Sometimes I lift the veil to these tender interior moments (the niece in the coffin, the dad in the cancer ward, the thoughts of ending life) and it becomes a holy gift which leads to my listener’s heart to break open like mine. But Reality is more than we can bear and I might force it. Or I might be invitational, but my listener does not walk through that door. So many risks in love!