Poetry of War and Hope: Exploring the Work of David Dephy
In an age marked by displacement, disillusionment, and the search for meaning, David Dephy’s poetry offers a rare fusion of grief and grace. His latest collection, Rays Never Were So Near As Now, gathers four years of verse into a coherent, soul-deep cry against violence—and a whispered invitation to hold onto beauty and hope. Dephy, a Georgian-born poet now living in New York, writes from lived experience: war exile, spiritual longing, and a hard-won optimism that resists cliché. This post explores his work through its central themes—war, silence, divinity, and the elemental need to believe in something beyond despair.
Witnessing War: Poems That Refuse to Look Away
Dephy’s collection is steeped in the violence of recent history—particularly the war in Ukraine, where he draws a direct line between poetry and resistance. In “Divine Ukraine,” the country is not just a place but a being: “Your heart is garden of kisses.” That embodiment turns geopolitical tragedy into a visceral, human ache.
Likewise, in “Empty Strollers in Front of You,” a haunting poem about civilian death, Dephy avoids abstraction. Instead, he asks us to see: “Now you see what moskals are. Don’t say a word. / Take a deep breath.” The breath—so simple, so essential—becomes an act of witness, of survival.
These are not protest poems in the traditional sense. There is no manifesto. But they are poems of confrontation. They ask, with unflinching honesty, “Are we really what we allow ourselves to be?”
Silence, Stillness, and the Sound of Faith
What stands out most in Dephy’s work is not anger—it’s reverence. In poem after poem, silence becomes sacred. “Silence is garden,” he writes in “Fog.” In “As the Breath of Mother,” the speaker meditates beneath an oak tree in the dark, listening to shadows that sing like kin.
Dephy’s poetic world is built from absence—bomb craters, empty subway stations, lonely city streets—and he fills those absences with presence: breath, prayer, hope. He listens, and invites us to listen too.
It’s a poetry that believes in the mystical power of language. In “The Gift,” the speaker remembers a childhood ability to say “rose” and have people actually smell it. “I lost that gift,” he writes, “but I found it once again / when I was miserable.” Words become spells—not metaphors, but tools of transformation.
The Sacred in the Political
Many of Dephy’s poems drift between spiritual imagery and concrete war zones. This is especially true in “Take Your Sandals Off Your Feet,” where the speaker walks in Ukraine and calls it “holy ground.” The poem blurs Moses’ burning bush moment with the modern horrors of missile fire and occupation. What does it mean to speak of sacredness in a landscape soaked in blood? Dephy’s answer is indirect but firm: “We shall discover each other / far on the other side of alone.”
In “Jerusalem,” the speaker writes of “time invisible at night,” and of “truth emerging / in between echoes of explosions.” Here, hope is not naïve—it’s a survival mechanism. The spiritual is not separate from the political. It’s embedded, incarnated.
New York as Sanctuary, Memory as Homeland
Though much of the collection addresses global conflict, there is a local intimacy as well. Poems like “D Train,” “Time Square,” and “A Bird Above New York City” reclaim urban space as spiritual terrain. In these verses, Manhattan becomes a place where “time was endless,” where “seeds of silence” fall and bloom, even amid subway noise and traffic hum.
And throughout the book, memory itself becomes a homeland. “Forever for One Second” uses the line that gives the book its title—“rays never were so near as now”—to describe a moment of stillness, when hope hangs in the air like early light. In this framework, memory isn’t nostalgia; it’s the way we survive trauma. It’s the breath we take before speaking again.
Love as the Final Word
Despite everything—war, exile, grief—Dephy’s poems return to love. Love not just as romance, but as communion, humility, and kinship. In “If I Speak in the Tongues of Men,” he echoes Corinthians: “but have not love, I am nothing.”
And in the quiet, devastating “Through Our Wishes,” the speaker remembers his parents, a summer full of locusts and crickets, and the deep ache of absence. “I miss your hands,” he writes. “The smell of joy— / comforting through the centuries of dark.”
In David Dephy’s world, even suffering can be held in the same hands as praise. Even the darkest night has room for a breath, a word, a ray of morning light.
Why His Poetry Matters Right Now
In a moment where algorithms flatten nuance and outrage often outpaces empathy, Dephy’s poems do something radical: they slow down. They invite contemplation. They offer no answers, but they offer company.
He writes, “we all are alone in our own journey / but many are going with us.” That, ultimately, is the thesis of Rays Never Were So Near As Now. These are poems for those who have walked through fire, and for those still breathing through the smoke.
If you’re looking for poetry that is politically conscious, spiritually resonant, and linguistically alive, David Dephy’s work will meet you where you are—and take you further.
Where to Get the Book
Rays Never Were So Near As Now is available now from Westbrae Literary Group. You can find it on Amazon, or explore our full catalog at westbraeliterarygroup.com.
Let these poems breathe with you. Let them remind you what poetry is still capable of doing.
