Width, Length, Height, Depth

‘I can look nowhere / but up the sheer red walls’ /

“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:17–18).

There is something small
about the love of God.

I clamber up a few rocks,
walk a hundred yards

through pink sand,
then feel the canyon walls

converge on my shoulders.
Just skin, hawk song,

my blood pounding
against fossils in the dark,

my only movements my hands
channeling the marrow

of sandstone. I can look nowhere
but up the sheer red walls

pocked and hallowed
by chronicles of rain,

forever closing
but never touching,

in the gap
the whole sky caught.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air as well as How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry.”

Inspired by Jenny's Canyon, Snow Canyon State Park, Utah. From Second Sky by Tania Runyan (Cascade Books, 2013). Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Scripture epigraph added by the editors.

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Also in this Issue

Issue 27 / July 23, 2015
  1. Editors’ Note

    Issue 27 (our first anniversary!): Peregrine falcons, the storm that changed Western Christianity, and a wonderful word after waiting. /

  2. Finding Flight with the Falcons

    Considering the peregrine, who are we to think we belong in the air? /

  3. ‘God Blew, and They Were Scattered’

    God may or may not have played a role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. What mattered is that everyone at the time thought he did. /

  4. Perhaps This Mid-May

    28 cycles of waiting. Then a final message. /

  5. Wonder on the Web

    Issue 27: Links to amazing stuff /

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