Two Poems by Donovan McAbee

Hanging Out with Jesus on a Sunny Day

Nothing at all like we expected, his Second Coming—no trumpet, no clouds,
no thousand-year reign. He just showed up one day at Delightful Dishes
and became a regular at lunch, a fixture around town, those three years
before he disappeared again. Jesus, literally here, in Inman, South Carolina.
Whenever I’d see him walking down the street, I’d yell out Hey Jesus! And he’d say,
Don-o-van, my man! We’d high five and chest bump, bring-it-in-here-how-you-been
bromance kind of hug. One day, Jesus and me, started comparing beards,
and he gave me a hard time about all the gray in mine, and I felt just a little
sensitive about the gray and about the aging, and I got just a little huffy
with my bromance Savior, so I started making “your mama” jokes at Jesus—
and my goodness, he got touchy because, Jesus, is he ever defensive
about his mama, particularly about her virginity, which to be fair
proves easy fodder for “your mama” jokes. But then, I said, I’m sorry, Jesus.
Can you forgive me for making “your mama” jokes? And he said, Yeah, I kind of have to.
It’s just part of the gig and all. And I felt a little sorry for Jesus, since he’s not even
allowed to hold a little grudge—and what’s life all about, if not to hold on
to a petty grudge every now and then? And I realized maybe being God
really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Then Jesus healed a few sick folk—
like he always did—before he started in with the party tricks. He knelt
on the ground next to the flower bed at the library, gathered a mound of red clay
with his hands, formed it into a dove and blew his breath into the bird’s
tiny beak. And then, without a word, he flung the bird into the air,
and we watched it fly up and up, into the blue, clear, endless sky.

Cumberland Koans

The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.
I find that it often falls on me too.

*

Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,
especially if you keep all your eggs in one basket.

*

All I’ve got is words to fumble through this silence.

*

I only write poems about things I’ve forgotten.

*

What losing hasn’t taught me, winning never will.

*

Faith is hoping
you will hold onto me
as I let go of you.

*

The way the body, near its end,
holds our breath for ransom

*

I know a man who goes around
puncturing other people’s canned laughter.

*

The church—the gathered few
who think we’ve heard the Almighty
tapping back against the wall
we beat our heads on at night.

*

I’m playing hide-n-go-seek with the Grim Reaper.

*

He has trouble accepting that the most apt
metaphor for his life is a bicycle without brakes.

*

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man gouges out his good eye.

*

What zealots never want to admit: God is always a stranger.

*

A Platonic theory of carnal knowledge—
she reminded me how to do things
I’d never done before.

*

Writing with a sense of absence
enlarges the presence
of the thing that’s missing.
This too is how I go about loving.

*

We’re all Time’s captives.
One of these days, though,
I’m breaking out.

*

Go and see who’s at the door, but load the gun first.
You can’t be too sure these days what you’ll find staring back.
I’ve learned to approach mirrors with a similar suspicion.

*

The disconcerting thought is that life is not illusory.

*

I wake at 3AM, searching again
for the God who’s gone missing.

*

It all happened so fast.
Everything does
when it happens.

*

Nothing takes forever.

*

Intimations of the sublime—
just this evening, as the rain was passing,
I drove from the countryside into town,
and as I looked across a field, at the sky beyond,
I thought to myself, “What a wonderful waste of time my life has been.”

*

Being with her changed my entire outlook.
It made me realize how happy I had been
in the absence that preceded her arrival.

*

When all that’s left is almost gone,
console yourself in the recognition
that there wasn’t much to begin with.

*

The less you mean by what you say,
the angrier you get when someone disagrees.

*

The problem with God is not that he’s a projection of ourselves.
It’s that often he’s not even a projection of our better selves.

*

At some point when it’s given,
we all fail the test of Time.

*

As if this moment weren’t enough,
I have the audacity to ask to live forever.

*

The world is not so much full of analogies as it is of hints.

*

You can’t even be born all by yourself.

*

We know one thing in terms of another.
How we know the first thing
is still shrouded in mystery.

*

One hundred years with you, my dear,
would not be enough; though perhaps by then,
our bodies might change our minds about that.

*

My to do list:
so much to do
so little worth doing.

Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Hudson Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, and a variety of other places. His academic monograph Charles Simic and the Poetics of Uncertainty was published in 2020. He grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and works as Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University, where he is Co-Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Grant: ‘“Boundless Love”: Changing Ideas of the Sacred in Americana Music’. Donovan lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their two children. His poetry collection Holy the Body is set to be released in the US by Texas Review Press in March 2026.