Someone once asked me why my poems are "God-obsessed", underlining that no matter where they start, it seems they often evince a "re-linking", or attempt at re-linking, to Source—which, like a slingshot, plummets them to End. The only way to know something is to know what something is for, and this, I think, is why my poems constantly seek what we are for. This is what makes them "God-obsessed."

This search for purpose follows the route of naming, finding the word for a thing, a moment, a verb—and doing so with the heart. Hence, my poems often involve the act of calling. It is what I do, what I am called to do.

I am indebted to my roots, from where I gain first thought, first heart, first appetence. But I am equally indebted to my uprooting, for the latter has allowed me to live in the country of language and of intercultural liturgies.

And home is now here, in Virginia, where I would not minimize the invigorating influence of dailiness. A husband's voice, a neighbor's wave, a tweet—now known—under the abelia, a town's white dogwoods and its scars—all these, the altar and the aisles for a poetry whose accoutrements come from ago, afar.

Sofia M. Starnes
Williamsburg, Virginia, 2003