From the Editor Summer 2021

It is not that we cannot see the beauty in the world, sometimes, we need our better angels to draw back the curtain to help us see. Color and light can sometimes allude us as we stare into the monochromatic tedium of routine. PAN-O-PLY hopes we can bring to you some of the best better angels in Michiana.

Thank you for visiting the summer release of PAN-O-POLY Story & Art Michiana. We are excited to be back this summer in our third year of publishing. There is such joy in meeting with the artists, writers and musicians who create locally. This quarter I spoke with David Kendall at the Electric Brew in Goshen, then toured the imagination of Kendall in his studio. Cynthia Davis met with Justin McCormick to learn about his music and career. It is wonderful to have galleries and art fairs open again, to meet people face to face see their work and talk about styles, mediums and creativity. We are seeing poets gather in person at the Bookworm in Elkhart, and I had the honor of reading at the Poetry Den’s ninth anniversary in June. Congratulations Pam Blair! Art and creativity are springing back to life from gallery to concert.

I want to thank all the artists and writers who have so kindly contributed to PAN-O-PLY. We are proud to show your work as some of the best Michiana has to offer.

A LOVE POEM

BY Dan Breen

Allow me to be your disciple

Let my faith be a fever

Of belief never again to be cooled

By the hands of dangerous demons

Let me believe without placing

My fingers inside the wounds of misgiving

I want to wear our love

As a golden vestment of a priest

Whose passionate prayer

Rejoiced and rejoined by joyful

Thronging voices of thousands

Raising songs of glory and praise

I want to wear our love

Like the mantel of a queen

Expressing fidelity kissing the hem

Of our sacred union  past and present

I want other’s lovers

To cat call as we saunter

In a silky number

Turning heads in slick back stilettos

I want to wear our love

All the days of our life

And when we get holes from neglect

Or from trying to hard at life

Or not hard enough

I want to patch it up with forgiveness

From what we have learned

Make it whole again

Even more in its adding

When we are very old

Needing warmth in our chilled bones

I will cover us in a quilt of memory

The squares of joy shall remind us

Of laughter and days on beaches

And children, summer, and, and so much more