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                        “the radical contingency of the world”
                        —Bishop Robert Barron

        Clean and warm, a sleeping baby
        dies in his crib. We have not had
        enough of baby. We want more.

        A young barista perishes
        in a pileup: just like that, she’s gone
        into the vacuum we abhor.

        Slowly, an aged father dwindles,
        eases away—too soon for us,
        if not for him—through a one-way door.

        Someone loves us, then they don’t,
        and all our litanies of loss
        will not bring back what we had before.

        Love, health, memory, skill:
        ours but not ours, we learn, in this
        long-lasting and uncivil war.

        Keep your cloudy eternity.
        We are not gluttons. All we want,
        right here, right now, is a long encore.

                    The Lord giveth like a playground bully,
                    taketh back grinning all his gifts:
                    taketh back, and doth not restore.

 Jane Greer edited and published Plains Poetry Journal and is author of Bathsheba on the Third Day and Love like a Conflagration.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”