Welcome to our Summer 2016 Edition!

Last year during this season, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality
for all. For this issue, in the season of that decision’s year anniversary, we requested
poetry that was LGBTQ-themed. All were welcome to submit.

Soul-Lit is a journal of and for spiritual poetry; it lives at
the rarely quiet, (though often still), deeply rooted,
constantly transforming, and maddeningly enduring
junction of poetry and spirituality. It can be a rough neighborhood.
In deciding on a themed issue such as this one, both its conjoining ways came into play.

At this writing, in my own spiritual tradition, we are in the same month in which
the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.
A Midrash (an artistic, questioning
form of spiritual literature)
states that the Temple was razed
because of Baseless Hatred.
Much later, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook
added that, a Temple destroyed by Baseless Hatred
can only be rebuilt by Baseless Love, Love Without Reason.

In one of this issue’s amazing featured poems, Julian "Jules" Collins writes of being
“presented in an image/Utterly incongruous with how I feel.”

And so the conjoining occurs.

Poems are made of images, images (hope-fully) congruous with how the poet and the reader feel, or can come to feel.

But why? Why create them at all? Why publish them?

On what basis but Baseless Love? Love that needs no Reason, nor has to provide one.

If the roads of poetry and spirituality indeed meet, this is the name of the town square that this meeting creates: Love Without Reason.

Soul-Lit is pleased and proud to present this LGBTQ-themed issue.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

Wayne-Daniel Berard
Co-Editor

(With thanks to Rabbi Suri, B’nai Or, Boston).