Spring Variations on a Theme by Lorenzo Snow
March 20, 2018As man, is God—once.
Was—as God is man—
DiaBLOGue
Mechanical Failures
March 20, 2018The old man shimminates and coughs
along the shoulder of the road
and veers like the wobble in the wheel
that brought his Airstream to a stop.
Three-Legged Dog
March 20, 2018An old three-legged dog,
whiskers whitening, coat black
as the carbon of a starless winter night,
slowly hobbyhorses along
the cobblestone street near the
park green and water blue of
Gradina Cismgiu in graying Bucharest.
A Proposal
March 20, 2018When your snow melts,
pick a late spring day,
and wear your Levis.
City of Brotherly Love
March 20, 2018On the hottest of days
in the sweltering summer of Philadelphia—
when city streets sizzled like bacon with
paved heat and the smothered air
Beautiful Black Madonna of Czestochowa
March 20, 2018They journey with hope
of a blessing, a healing, a miracle of sorts
for they have heard the stories told
of old.
The Blessing
March 20, 2018You never can tell what April is going to be like in Boise. Sometimes you get sunshine, sometimes you get rain, and sometimes you get blizzards that roar out of the canyons. I died in…
Entertaining Angels Unaware
March 20, 2018Lucy hated arguing with her companion in public, even though they argued in English so most people couldn’t understand what they were saying, and those who did could probably care less. They didn’t argue often,…
A Playwright with a Passion for Unvarnished Depictions: An Interview with Tom Rogers
March 20, 2018One day when my BYU Greek class was awaiting the arrival of our teacher, Tom Rogers popped his head in the doorway and talked to us for ten or fifteen minutes or so. (One of my fellow students must have been a friend of his.) At that point he was well known for his plays Huebener and Fire in the Bones, which dealt with two conflicted tragic heroes in Mormon history, Helmuth Huebener and John D. Lee. Someone asked him why he wrote about such problematic figures. His answer, as I remember it, was, “Those kinds of situations are just so interesting!”
Shadows on the Sun Dial: John E. Page and the Strangites
March 20, 2018William Wine Phelps, an influential Mormon high priest at Nauvoo, Illinois, wrote a long emotional letter on Christmas Day in 1844 which praised Mormonism, the martyred Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Smith’s deceased brothers (Hyrum, Don Carlos, and Samuel), and current Mormon leaders. He also composed pseudonyms for the twelve apostles, the group which assumed the leadership of the Mormon Church following Joseph Smith’s death, pseudonyms which became associated with the twelve men. For example, he described Brigham Young as “the lion of the Lord,” Orson Hyde as “the olive branch of Israel,” and John E. Page as “the sun dial.”