Sardis—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.

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Sardis

by Tania Runyan

She sprays the nursery toys with water and bleach,
erasing snot and drool from stacking rings, 
wiping board books crimped by toddlers' teeth.
The congregation mingles in the wings.

The morning's Danish and donut halves go stale. 
She wants to curl in the berbered corner to doze
but needs to dump and scour the diaper pail
before the second service fills the rows.

She dares to bow in the blocks to say a prayer
for the hands that will clutch these rattles and dolls,
but that woman with implants and highlit hair 
nudges her friend and snickers down the hall.

Now whether to scrub the carpet's spit-up stains. 
If it's even possible to strengthen what remains.

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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.