Braving Ruin: Three Poems by Samantha Terrell.

"Braving Ruin" is our first contributor publication. We are honored to feature these poems by Samantha Terrell.

🔥 Embers — Warmth for the long winter

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Samantha Terrell’s poetry has been widely anthologized across journals in the U.S. and U.K., Her collections carry a sharp awareness of contradiction, compassion, and survival. She also curates the SHINE international poetry series, amplifying voices across borders.

In “Braving Ruin”, Samantha Terrell maps a passage from the contradictions of power, to the intimacy of witness, to the grief of ecological collapse—threads of cultural resistance and personal resilience woven through irony, compassion, and lament.

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I’d Write a Poem About

the irony of a dictator 
declaring a “Liberation Day”

or 

St. Catherine’s Monastery being
turned into a luxury resort

or a gun rights activist being
killed by an act of gun violence,

but pain can render even a 
wordsmith, word-less

and sometimes only the paradoxical
can explain the simple. 

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For the US Airman On Hunger-Strike for Gaza

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Eco-Ruins

eternity rocks my core.
guide-light beacon blinks
off-shore, coastal ruins
curl – up-turned lips
lost without the crash of
waves to console them. 

dripping dry, a 
melted infinity of sweat
droplets withstood storms, only to
call out for more heat and burn,
making peace with desolation.
struck by fire’s power,

or thrashed by repeated
lashings of anchor ropes
tethered to a moving shoreline.
floodwaters and tears mingle, where – a 
region away – dried-earthen 
cracks cry out, “I thirst.”

I thirst. I thirst.

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We welcome poetry, essays, stories, art, and other creative works for Embers Quarterly. If you’d like to share your voice, see our submission call here. Calling All Writers, Artists, and Creatives! Submissions Open for the First Issue of Embers Quarterly

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