Like
hunting hawks
dove
from the car
wings folded

The canyon echoed the crack
crack, crack as we fired
at shadows

We didn’t know then,
the cat
could
have cured us
and the quiet Spring night
soothed
our burning

________________________________________________________________

To read more of Steve’s poetry and see his bio, click here, here, here, here, and here.

*contest entry*

He stood wondering about the strings
of which some say he was made

Of what tidal forces were they drawn?
What sort of other moon forced him
into existence by its orbit around . . . what?

He placed his foot in the sand
it felt cool, rough, and yielding

What are these qualia, ‘cool’, ‘rough’,
‘yeilding’, and why such pleasantness
bubbling up in the vibrations he has become?
How do vibrations, causing vibrations, ponder
those vibrations?

Becoming? Vibrations becoming?
Vibrations becoming him?

Before the deep waves had twisted into
just the right harmonies to
create this self, this himself,
what was there? Nothing? Abyss?
but then . . .
How? Why? How why now?

So there is the moon—a bolus of strings
bouncing light waves from an even larger
solar knot of strings, exciting waves
in neural bundles packed within her eye,
passing through intricate
webs of waves upon waves in intricate and
complex tangles and astonishing frequencies,
which finally erupted into

a pleasant night, on a beach, watching the
ocean move.

__________________________________________________________________________

Steve Peck is an ecologist at Brigham Young University. Creative works include a novel: The Gift of the King’s Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications); a self-published novella A Short Stay in Hell (reviewed here and here), a short science fiction story: The Flaw in the Lord Harrington Scenario, published in HMS Beagle (online journal by Elsevier); poetry in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, BYU Studies, Irreantum, Red Rock Review, Glyphs III, Tales of the Talisman (in press), and a chapbook of poetry published by the American Tolkien Society called Flyfishing in Middle Earth.  Steve blogs at bycommonconsent.com and has a faith/science blog called The Mormon Organon.  For other poems by Steve, go here and here.

*contest entry*

Thanks–deep, ever-flowing thanks–to Wm Morris, for helping me open this space and for providing solid support.

Thanks, WIZ readers, for taking time out of your no doubt very busy schedules to while away moments here.  Writing without audience is, if not dead, not as alive as it might be.

Thanks to contributors who have submitted work and helped establish literary bio-diversity for the site.  You have no idea how good it has been to meet you (in an Internet way) and work with you.

Thanks to my family for enduring my distraction with this project, and especially thanks to my son Saul for his tech support and other vital forms of participation.

My hope is that, over the next year, I’ll be able to take WIZ to another level, one that will make more worthwhile everyone’s interest, faith, and participation.   The literary nature and science writing field is burgeoning, including among LDS.  I fully intend to find a way to gather its flowers while I may.