A Song for Times Like These

A welcome and a poem for you.

This is a cozy autumnal hello to our several hundred new subscribers over the past few weeks. I am so grateful you are here. I’m Kimberly Phinney, professor, poet, and counselor, and My Way Back is my weekly newsletter from the www.TheWayBack2Ourselves.com, a literary journal, podcast, publisher, and creative community based on faith and belonging, which I founded in 2022. If you’re new here, WELCOME! You are warmly invited to subscribe below.

LIT JOURNAL NEWS FOR YOU:

Before I share a new poem that I hope might bless you in the times we find ourselves in, here are a few important announcements about our literary journal’s Fall Collection: To the Mountains and the Storyteller Poetry Contest:

• Our submissions closed on Oct. 1st, 2025. We were blown away by the number of submissions that rolled in by the end of the season. The editors and I have already gotten to work, and we can’t wait to enjoy your stunning writing and art.

• We will be announcing the Storytellers Poetry Contest Winners in early November right here on Substack first, and the fall collection, TO THE MOUNTAINS, will be published on our website on November 19, 2025. While you wait for the Fall Collection, you’re welcome to read our Spring Collection for free HERE.

• We will email all entrants their submission status in the coming weeks, as we work through your submissions. There is only a digital collection this fall. Our print journal is in the spring. We are still determining if we will have our Poetry Corner Podcast this season.

• The Storytellers Poetry Contest Winners:

  • We will award first, second, and third place. All three will be awarded publication and featured in the Fall Collection. The news will be announced here first, so stay tuned!

  • First place will win $250, second place will win $100, and third place will win $50.

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A NEW POEM FOR YOU:

And before I go, here’s a brand-new poem (in process) that came to me today in my lament and longing. I think you might understand. May my humble offering bless you somehow and may you hear sweet birdsong cut through the noise.

Four Swifts with Landscape, sketches By Vincent Van Gogh

BIRDSONG
by Kimberly Phinney

I long 
for birdsong—
and not the groans of politicos and those hooked on their politics 
     or the disembodied theology of the systems that hurt us
          or the waging of wars and the grinding gears of the machines 
               or the glowing, shiny screens and screaming algorithms. 

I lean 
in, turn my head toward the sun and listen for bird trills instead— 
because they remember what we have long forgotten 
out past our concrete jungles and skyscraper vistas. 
I bend my ear to hear their long, sweet notes, 
flowing up and out of their mouths 
from deep inside their thumb-sized hearts,
a honey baptizing this broken world—
at once a paradise and a curse, at once a cage and a universe.

I love 
their arias, their harmonies, their call and response, 
and what they strive to say, 
and though I cannot make out their words, this cadence is a language 
much closer to the God I serve—
so I will listen, and I will learn it, so I might herald it to the masses.

I like 
to believe despite all that is wrong,
the cardinal, the warbler, the finch, and the wren 
all know what mornings need at the crack of dawn:
to begin again—slates sung clean,
     to worship in praise of what’s still good
          without demanding knowledge, 
               to bring down leaven—our daily bread...

“On Earth,” they sing, “as it is in Heaven.” 

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.”

– Job 12:7-8

Yes, I pray may it be so. Thank you for being here. God bless you all.

You belong here,

me

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