Among Winter Cranes
“Even as birds that winter on the Nile…” (Purgatorio XXIV.64)
The Quarterly of the Christian Poetics Initiative | Vol. 8 Issue 1 | Winter 2025
“Search Terms”
by Ben Egerton
Ben Egerton is the author of two poetry collections, the most recent of which is Antiphony | Anti-Phoney (Buttonhook Press, 2025).
laburnum seed pods are easily confused for runner beans
this is the mistake my Sunday School friends make when they play house in their garden and it is play dinner time what’s better than to take familiar legumes from an abundant tree to nourish bellies of children playing adult? this is what we know when the tree emergencies into operation —they’re in hospital: pray and fast until they’re in the clear; ring your five designated names with the same instructions; we’ll reach everyone still holding the phone mum tells me what’s happened still holding the phone mum prays her praying voice registers competing incredulities: possibility of children lost to poisonous pods / children don’t know a laburnum from a runner / conviction where are they now? the hours I spend online, reaching for the past of the garden, for children harmed by one tree and saved by another and others lost to time / from faith I go on attempting various search terms—combinations of names, christian and sur, home town, dates—to unlock and I wonder if memory serves or if memory protects or if memory play tricks or if protection is the trick memory serves as I think of those others who ate from the tree in their garden when they were playing house and forgetting how the tree served themOn Childhood Friendships and Faith
by Ben Egerton
On the left wing of the church,
you sit in rows with the other boys
dressed tidy like a supermarket shelf of tuna
listening to the sermon about a version of Hell[.]
When I left home, I kept some school friends, and I left my church friends. And that was that. I’ve neither heard from nor seen any of them since. For a while I’d ask my mother if she knew what So-and-so was up to. But when my parents left the Fellowship, at a stroke all contact with so much of my childhood was lost. And in time—although my faith remains—I distanced myself from the Fellowship faith. For I’m still asking: what is authentic faith, and what is authentic friendship?
*
& so I slipped through the cracks, can’t tell you
how it was done: the plain act
of drawing breath each time,
dubbing alternative endings for myself[.]
Ben Egerton
Director of Initial Teacher Education and Lecturer, School of Education at Victoria, University of Wellington, New Zealand
Associate Fellow, Rivendell Center for Theology and Arts, Rivendell Institute at Yale University
ben.egerton@vuw.ac.nz