Dear Reader,
I’m honored to share that my poem, “Our Lady of Longing,” was recently published in The Dewdrop, a journal I deeply admire for its curation of writing that sits at the intersection of the sacred, the poetic, and the human. To be featured in a publication that consistently honors mystery, interiority, and contemplative thought is a real gift—and one that feels especially meaningful for this particular poem.
“Our Lady of Longing” is a brief, but layered piece. It explores the gaze, the body, and the sacred—with all the discomfort and complexity those themes evoke when placed within religious contexts. The poem opens in a church, where a woman bows before the cross, her body unwittingly breaking through the decorum of piety. The priest, watching, is caught between desire and judgment, conviction and confusion. The Virgin Mary, carved in cold marble, presides silently over the moment—not as a passive symbol of purity, but as a potential mirror of longing herself.
At its heart, the poem is about the ambiguity of holiness, the way desire haunts even our most sacred spaces. It asks what we do with longing—sexual, emotional, spiritual—especially when it emerges in spaces that often ask us to repress or ignore it. It wonders if even the icons we venerate might ache in ways we haven’t imagined.
I wrote this poem with a sense of tension: between the human and the divine, between form and transgression, between devotion and desire. It’s intentionally unresolved. That’s important to me. I’m not interested in offering easy answers or moral lessons—poetry isn’t a sermon, after all. But I am interested in naming the uneasy places, in exploring what it might mean to be fully human within traditions that often try to idealize or sanitize the human condition.
I’m grateful to The Dewdrop not only for featuring the piece, but for being a space where this kind of exploration is possible. Their editorial vision consistently elevates work that is spiritually curious, emotionally resonant, and open to complexity. That’s a rare and valuable thing.
For those of you who’ve followed my work—especially my ongoing attempts to reckon with the space between faith and flesh, dogma and desire—I hope this poem speaks into that space with honesty and tenderness. I hope it opens something up. And I hope, perhaps, it gives you permission to bring your whole self—body, ache, doubt, reverence—into your encounter with the sacred.
You can read the poem here: Our Lady of Longing – The Dewdrop
Thank you for reading, always.
—Ryan
PS
Here is another new poem for you to enjoy!
THE BENDS
Ive drowned too many times to believe in Poseidon.
Cut my hands on coral just to discover
that Atlantis isn’t real—all those years,
spent searching, hoping to find a magic city
at the bottom of your heart.
No one goes deep that doesn’t get lost.
The deeper you go the darker it gets.
They say to find love you have to dig
through the dredge, walk through the rotten
whale bones and call upon the sea.
As a child I held my breath. My burning lungs
begging for relief. When they found me
on the lake shore, I was blue from
lack of blood—they say the son of Neptune
died in search of love.