Sig Royspern

A Rainfall of Questions Collected in the Form of a Poem

Sig Royspern

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Royspern offers fourteen oracular questions on aging, addiction to possessions, water striders, magnolias, slippery fish, moths and the moon, priests and leaf-rakers, weeds and flowers, the price of education, abandoned groceries, spiritual pilgrimage, melons and oats, similes, and the impossibility of finding a store that sells a spring wind.

Things That Renew Hope

Sig Royspern

No. 8 · Winter 2000

Inspired by Andrew Greeley’s Religion as Poetry, which defines religion as hope-renewing experiences and the stories, symbols, rituals, and images that preserve them, Rauspern offers a list-poem of small renewals of hope: lovers kissing in the street, the first snowfall of each year, compost and spring sprouts and Jewish humor, kids’ summer mischief, a mother nursing her baby on the bus, small jazz ensembles, two old men reconciling without remembering why, an unscheduled gift, the blues, a child taking him by the hand, and a gray-haired man who threw his cellular phone in the river.