27 Apr Wounded by George Howell
take things to heart,
a cliché, yes
but the things I laugh at
often come back as a heartache
and an inspiration.My chalice is tongue-in-cheek.
Yes, a bucket from Home Depot
on a table leg and an old cutting board.
Not sure, at first
how much I believed
in the Holy Grail
as myth.
But why can’t the sacred lie
in ordinary things?
The grail a serving plate,
a goblet,
utensils for eating and drinking
sacred for what they do,
not what they are.
The blood of Christ
caught in a single cup,
the wounding,
and the gnawing consciousness
of guilt,
wounded,
a shame.
Yearning for a place in the spirit,
I took communion
and sang the Old Testament psalms
and ultimately left the Church,
again.
This is the nature of guilt and shame,
the duality of heart and mind—
I feel deeply
what I cannot believe in.
I love the earth,
the mountains and the stars,
the material presence
as illusory as light,
as mercurial
as an intuition.
A materialist
in the house of the spirit,
I take things too seriously.
I trust in the heart
to heal its wounds.
About the Poet
Former Buffalo-based poet, writer, and editor George F. Howell passed away on March 15, 2025 in Seattle, Washington. He was 76.
Howell was born in Hartford, Connecticut on November 6th, 1948. He was the eldest of 8 siblings, 6 boys and 2 girls. While George was quite young, his family moved from Coventry, Connecticut to Depew, New York, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He was a boy scout, played in intramural sports, and helped form a poetry club in high school. He wrote his first poetry in grade school, and was a lifelong poet, artist, and musician. He was an astute observer of life, with a sense of humor that was evident to the end.
Howell received a Bachelor’s Degree from Buffalo State University, and a Master’s Degree in Literary Arts from Binghamton University. In his twenties and thirties, he became very active in the Buffalo arts and literary scene, and was one of the founding generation of Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, curating and hosting its first reading reading and literary series called Writeratio in 1975. A collection of his experimental writings Working Book was published by Periplus Press in 1978.
In the 1980’s he became one of the founding editors of Buffalo Arts Review, and its senior editor, editor-in-chief, and lead writer and reviewer for many of its issues.
George left Buffalo in the late 1980’s for California, where he wrote for a variety of alternative weeklies and arts publications in the Los Angeles area. There he met his wife Mary Best while volunteering to help El Salvadorian immigrants adjust to this country.
George and Mary moved to the Washington, D.C. area in the 1990’s for work. They lived and worked in D.C until moving to Twenty Nine Palms, California, a desert artist community, in 2013, after George retired from his work at the American cable and satellite television network C-Span.
Howell moved to Providence Mount St. Vincent (the Mount), in Seattle, Washington, in April of 2024, to receive assistance as he battled living with a rare form of Parkinson’s called Multiple Systems Atrophy. He received heartfelt care in the assisted living, rehab, and skilled nursing sections of the Mount as his disease progressed.
This poem appears The Stony Embrace, a collection of poems by Howell published in 2019 by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library.
Related Event
- A Buffalo area memorial service for George F. Howell organized by his family and friends is tentatively being planned for Saturday, July 19 at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 341 Delaware Ave. in Buffalo. Please check with Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center’s calendar or the Literature section of The Buffalo Hive for further details as the date approaches.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.