Smyrna—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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Smyrna

by Tania Runyan

No persecution in my leafy town,
so I turn myself over to my own hands,
forge iron bars, toss just enough fat 
to train the lions for ravaging.

I rope myself to the stake.
Whom do I trust in the night?
My creator or wikis on cancerous moles?
The cords cut in. Do I dare breathe,
sing praise? Forgive the prick
who tailed me all the way home?

I could save some of my life
burning incense to the emperor of default. 
He's capitulation, the whole day in bed. 
He's rage's reward, the ice cream prayer, 
the four hours of the Weather Channel 
chasing tornadoes of my dread.

But I can never recant, even as fangs flash
and paws fling up the dust. 
There's something about the smell
of bay laurel I can never leave behind—
lemons skimming a pitcher of water,
new rain on the mountains, the open-armed 
aroma of plucked leaves woven together 
and pressed to my exhausted head.

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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.

Photo by Majid Gheidarlou on Unsplash