Pergamum—Tania Runyan

Last month, we shared an interview with Tania Runyan. We are such fans of her poetry that we invited her to take over this Substack for the next two weeks. Tania has written several books of nonfiction and poetry, but we invited her to share a few poems from What Will Soon Take Place, a poetic journey through the book of Revelation. During this Stack Takeover, we’ll be sharing a few of our favorites, the poems based on the letters to the seven churches in Revelation.

For more articles, videos, books, and resources about faith and art, visit RabbitRoom.com

Pergamum

by Tania Runyan

In the end, of course,
it was just 

between us.
You held a flake

to my lips—
honey in hoarfrost.

And the stone
you pressed in my palm,

a magnolia bud
stippled with stars.

But my new name
was like nothing

created or spoken.
More elemental

than molecules
of wind, the inscription

of your breath.
This too I took

at the beginning 
of my death

and held 
beneath my tongue.

---

Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her first book-length creative nonfiction title, Making Peace With Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, was released in 2022. Tania’s instructional guides, How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem, are used in classrooms across the country, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, and the Paraclete anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She lives with her family in Illinois, where she works in educational publishing.

Photo by David Dvořáček on Unsplash