haley hodges schmid

Haley Hodges Schmid is an MFA (Poetry) candidate at Seattle Pacific University. She holds qualifications from Hope College, Shenandoah Conservatory, and Oxford University. Her work has been featured in Cassandra Voices, Ekstasis Magazine and Reformed Journal. Haley is a 2024 cohort member of the Rivendell Institute’s Christian Poetics Initiative. Her recent projects include The Gun Mass, an international collaborative choral work with music by Jamie Powe. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and young son.

passing

To desire and be desired in the brief

hour of my beauty, to gather purpled figs

from the vine in the passing season

of their sweetness, to wedge my finger

in the running hourglass that time

might recline its head on a borrowed bed,

silk-soothed as darkness heaves and deepens:

These things have I sought and come to grief.

Lovers, beauty, figs

and time all fall away like stars,

like white stones cast into a well.

In age the soul stands naked

as in birth, wedges the passing

season of its sweetness into the hourglass

like silk, heaving, deepening as it goes.

Read Haley’s work and more in Solum Journal Volume V (forthcoming).