Philip White

Philip White’s poems have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Slate, Poetry, Agni, New England Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. His first book, The Clearing, from which “Six O’Clock Flight to the Interment” is taken, won the Walt Macdonald Prize and was published in Texas Tech University Press in 2007. He teaches Shakespeare at Centre College.

Three Poems for My Mother

Articles/Essays – Volume 22, No. 2

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

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Island Spring

Articles/Essays – Volume 24, No. 1

Always she is there on that far island
in my mind, where it is always night,
and the moon tears into a world of leaves,
and is torn. A child, she steps 

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The Perseids

Articles/Essays – Volume 24, No. 4

Nerved sparks, the Perseids 
tonight, wincing out over Loafer 

Father, you taught me to name
these — each streak of fire

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Hands

Articles/Essays – Volume 25, No. 3

In the chapel, 
In the straightbacked 
Ache of the pew, 
We held them—lap toys 

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Litany

Articles/Essays – Volume 26, No. 2

All night, all day, angels 
watching over me, my Lord. 

And him slipping off, 
letting the door close

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God With Us

Articles/Essays – Volume 26, No. 2

At the baptismal Erma sings “Que grande es El,”
her voice breaking, 
and the woman she has brought to Jesus, 
clothed in white on the front row, weeps. 

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Storytime

Articles/Essays – Volume 27, No. 3

Even now in the stony 
courtyard under withered
vines the characters 

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1844

Articles/Essays – Volume 27, No. 4

Signs in the heavens. Great arcs of light
at midday. Drew it. Intend 
to ask Joseph what it means … 

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August

Articles/Essays – Volume 29, No. 3

Ahumming stillness. In the orchards up and down the valley
the pith of summer turns slowly to juices. Ripeness:
what my grandmother knows, hunched in her silence.

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History

Articles/Essays – Volume 30, No. 4

Small things: 
the smell of 

blocks he cut 
from pine light

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Clay

Articles/Essays – Volume 32, No. 1

On the sill, torsos wrenched out of clay 
still bore the sculptor’s mark, the print 

of cocked thumb and nail. Tortured, vaguely
female, they shamed us. We crowded in,

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Russell

Articles/Essays – Volume 32, No. 4

You’d been the one taken out and talked to during stories of Jesus.
On the scuffed pew you stuffed the blessed bread 
in your mouth and blew it out, laughing. 
So when they found you in blood at the foot of the stairs,

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Under the Faultline

Articles/Essays – Volume 32, No. 4

The night before, the earth had jolted us, 
A ripple in our sleep till Dad called it 
A quake and brought to life the massive plates
Beneath us gnashing the ages. It was 

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