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POETRY
Weddings
Try as I might
I cannot remember his face,
this
Jesuit, a scholar
more at ease with manuscripts than marriages,
nervous
as we on that overcast November day.
The Bronx, twenty-five years
ago,
the sacristy of Fordham University chapel:
he vested and, cigarette
shaking,
rehearsed in his head the vows
scrawled on a wrinkled
paper
to be trembled into a sacrament.
Years later in England,
the three of us met for pub food and a pint.
His research on Newman shuttled
him
between Birmingham and Freiburg,
riding the train of
bureaucracy
from “Blessed” to “Saint,”
awaiting the
necessary miracles.
Did a dead Cardinal work this small miracle,
gathering together in the yoke of years
a professor-priest and two
students
from a New York ghetto
“amid the encircling
gloom”?
Last January, a gentle German Jesuit
took time to
answer
our unopened Christmas card.
“Lead, kindly light,”
as Blehl himself had led us
into the unknown two decades ago.
His
face was thin, as I recall,
above his Roman collar,
his shoulders
narrow.
The night is dark,
and he is now at home.
--Donna Pucciani
Wheaton, Ill.
On Being Welcomed
Years of practice at being a guest
has heightened my
awareness
of welcome or its absence.
Tonight I’m slightly
afraid
of what reception awaits.
I am going into the Mojave
Desert
at 11 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2002.
Arriving at the highway boundary
line
of the Nevada Test Site is familiar;
the organizers have a small
campfire going.
The temperature is in the low 30s
and Brother Wind is
gentle, almost absent;
hopeful signs but I’ve had hard lessons
of
indifference from this desert.
I want to hear the silence of the
desert
and wander out into the dark.
Sister Moon is on the sunny side of
Earth
so the stars have the sky to themselves.
Their beauty is startling
but the
Milky Way, our home galaxy,
puts all else in the
background.
And then she very quietly, very lovingly,
floods WELCOME over
me.
--Art Casey
San Diego
Fecundity
Fecund God
of small things, God --
the
seed-of-the-grass God
the whole field, God
of all, be praised.
God
unlimited
by shape, yet limiting
for our sakes
yourself
be
praised,
accustomed as you are to swinging through
arcs of
universes
alone and seeking
with and leaving
always in motion, always
desiring
communion together
and yet alone:
Who can announce
you
revere you, detect you
knows you
the fecund twinkle
in a human
eye.
--Judith Robbins
Whitefield, Maine
Second Antiphon in the Style of
Hildegard
O You who squeeze the wind
until she howls,
who
wring the rain until
she gushes,
send electric waves
rushing through
the cord
to jolt the vacuum cleaner
to roaring life,
I praise your
power
moving in the homeliest of things.
Roses on couch cushions,
Lamp stands, small city gardens,
bath water slipping down the drain,
steel wool scouring egg crust off the iron frying pan.
--Sr. Anne Higgins, DC
Emmitsburg, Md.
Poems should be previously unpublished and limited to about 50
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number.
National Catholic Reporter, February 21,
2003
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