Ode To My Beloved

ODE TO MY BELOVED is written in two parts. Book one consists of eighty God inspired poems that were written for the Authors (The Lord and Barbara) Beloved. The book conveys a prophetic union between the co-author (Barbara) and a Promised spouse. God is mentioned as the co-authors Holy Spouse, who has revealed to Barbara her union with Him, as His Spiritual Bride. Book two contains eighty God inspired poems also, with additional excerpts and poems from Barbaras other literary works. BARBARA SPEAKING TO HER BELOVED I will follow your lead, O chosen one, into the Streets of Happiness and Eternal Bliss. I will follow your lead, O chosen one, with the Seal of His Holy Kiss. I will follow you, O chosen son of The Holy Trinity, into the Realm of Spiritual Tranquility. I will follow your lead, into The Arms of our Perfect King JESUS. I will follow your lead, into the Heavens that released us. I will follow you, O chosen one, into the Heart of The Only True God. I will follow your lead, O chosen son, with the Approval of His Love. I will follow you, O chosen one, into the Gates of Eternal Glory. I will follow your lead, into the Realm of The Greatest Story. I will follow you, O chosen one, into the Realm that gave birth to our love. I will follow you, O chosen one, to our Paradise above. I will follow you, O Blessed and Beloved one, into the Heavenly Lilies. I will follow you, O chosen one, Throughout Eternity. May you continue following The Holy Trinity, into The Gates of Paradise, O well loved one.

“Never before has the delight and wonder experienced in young love, in which is implicit physical discovery, been conveyed with such touching honesty or with rhapsody so involving unconscious pathos. Those who seek to drag any honest writing through the gutters of their own minds will do the same with this. Those who are not afraid of the strange miracle of life will understand this brave verse.” —William Rose Benét

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love. In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy. “I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.” Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.”

The thoughts expressed by the poetry you just read were hopeful of allowing you to enjoy reading the poetry and to afford you some solace, something to think about""a laugh or two.

Originally published in 1912, this book provides an extensive review of Gospel theology and Christology through the lens of the pseudepigraphical Psalms or Odes of Solomon. Abbott compares the language of the Gospels and other early Christian writings with the Psalms, and provides a translation of them, with alternative readings, at the back of the book. This richly detailed book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Christian readings of Jewish writings.