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Bagel Bard Dona Stein writes: “After a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University and some years in California teaching, writing, and publishing, I lived in Colorado also teaching, writing, and publishing, but also producing and hosting a radio program, The Poetry Show on KRFC FM in Fort Collins, Colorado. My most recent poetry collection is Alice in Deutschland.”

Dona Stein

OPEN

Why don’t the churches open their doors?
Will I steal candles, smash stained glass,
prise tiles from lovely mosaic floors,
bend the candle snuffer of solid brass?

Would I wrest down the sorrowful statues,
scrub blood from their dark feet?
I want to hear St. Lucy refuse
her plate of proffered eyes, add my muted bleat

of Lordy, I just want some peace, that’s all,
some quiet to ease the constant repetition
of human riot, meanness, hurt each to all
in our brilliant species’ oppression.

Let the organ resound with Widor’s
toccata in F Major that exhausts
the organ mistress in her organ slippers,
let me rest my forehead on the uppermost

scroll of the pew before me, its cool wood
a balm, let me hear the hidden choir exult.

— Dona Stein

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