Correction: This morning's newsletter included a misprint in today's poem. The corrected version is below.
Apologia to the Stag
Reginald Dwayne Betts
after Piero della Francesca's fresco of Saint Julian

Because, maybe, there was no stag
& the only curse was anger.
Blame desire—to desecrate, destroy,
Turn from prayer. What if Julian knew,
As we all know, when we test disaster,
& venture toward the last ledge,
Some lonely cherubim pulling
Us back, except we don't breathe
& instead shatter our histories;
What if there were no stag & only
The pause after, where escaping
Yesterday becomes folly
& recovery demands invention—
Shahid has lived in cities of men
Who know what it means to fail
To turn away. A man can walk
Until all his steps become sorrow,
& maybe others will name it pilgrimage,
& over two fingers of rum, maybe
They'll tell this story of the stag
Whose warning was ignored, & they
Will never say it was a collie or hound
Or small terrier that barked no,
Because then we'd know the lie
Of warning, know that a dog would
Leap before a blade to save the last
Bit of goodness we have, & so it is
A stag we hear of, instead of the horror
Of a man who should have paused.
& haven't we all been that man? Imagining
We might have listened if the voice
Warning was more eloquent or a bark
Or at least the stag we wish warned
Him? They say, the woman who took
His hand knew him better than the blood
That covered them, & years later, no one
Will say she was wrong, even then,
Knowing that when they left that disaster,
He was hoping to assemble what he'd broken,
The very best way he knew.
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In Italy, summer of 2023, I walked into a museum with a group of folks and stood before a depiction of St. Julian. The guide told us his story: a stag prophesied that Julian would murder his parents. Fearing the fate, Julian moved miles and miles away. But some prophesies you cannot escape, and so Julain would end up murdering his parents. Discovering his folly, he began to walk and walk and walk and didn't stop until he'd turned his life into a mission for others. Fast forward and he is annointed a Saint. I wept hearing it. Imagine a country like ours, where there feels to be no forgiveness, but a Catholic Saint is said to have murdered his parents. I wrote the poem, what if we might have such hope for mercy and forgiveness?

Reginald Dwayne Betts on "Apologia to the Stag"
Color cover image of Marie Howe's book, New and Selected Poems
2025 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

The winner of the 2025 Pultizer Prize Winner in Poetry was New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe (W. W. Norton & Company). The finalists were An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon Press) and Bluff: Poems by Danez Smith (Graywolf Press).

viaTHE PULITZER PRIZES
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Color cover image of Siddhartha Menon's book, The Compass Bird
What Sparks Poetry:
Siddhartha Menon on Drafts

"'Captivity' is true to the surface facts that it describes. Through the encounter with an unheeding bird, it is about the dichotomy between a full experiencing of something and the urge to record it by means of a camera—or, for that matter, to pin it down in real time through words, through labels. Does the capturing of experience come in the way of experience? Does the holding of something in posterity, or the attempt to do so, interfere with experiencing it in the quick? These are not rhetorical questions."
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