Today I hit 48. I’ve decided four dozen sounds better or 40 (base 12). Come to think of it in our digital age a much more natural base is 16 which makes me 30 (in hexadecimal). Of course I dread to think what age I’ve just reached in binary! 110,000 — about what I feel.
3 comments April 30th, 2006
St George, patron saint of England, gets buried under bigger beasts today, overshadowed by the Resurrection, Thomas’ affirmation of faith, and the forgiving breath of God.
I thought the least I could do was uncover a 7 year old homily for St. George, though in truth I think it’s more in praise of dragons … and Ursula LeGuin.
1 comment April 23rd, 2006
An old lady writes me in a spidery style,
Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand
Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein
Of such frail thoughts its thread is often broken;
Or else the filament from which a phrase is hung
Dims to my sense, but caught, it shines like steel,
As touch a line and the whole web will feel.
She describes my father, yet I forget her face
More easily than my father’s yearly dying;
Of her I remember small, buttoned boots and the place
She kept in our wooden church on those Sundays
Whenever her strength allowed;
Grey-haired, thin-voiced, perpetually bowed.
“I am Mable Rawlins,” she writes, “and know both your parents”;
He is dead, Miss Rawlins, but God bless your tense:
“Your father was a dutiful, honest,
Faithful, and useful person.”
For such plain praise what fame is recompense?
“A horn-painter, he painted delicately on horn,
He used to sit around the table and paint pictures.”
The peace of God needs nothing to adorn
It, nor glory nor ambition.
“He is twenty-eight years buried,” she writes, “he was called home,
And is, I am sure, doing greater work.”
Add comment April 23rd, 2006
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling.
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The lines flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Derek Mahon
Add comment April 22nd, 2006
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
Add comment April 21st, 2006
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Billy Collins
1 comment April 20th, 2006
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
Add comment April 19th, 2006
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
1 comment April 18th, 2006
His grace is no longer called for
before meals: farmed fish multiply
without His intercession.
Bread production rises through
disease-resistant grains devised
scientifically to mitigate his faults.
Yet, though we rebelled against Him
like adolescents, uplifted to see
an oppressive father banished –
a bearded hermit – to the desert,
we confess to missing Him at times.
Add comment April 17th, 2006
Loyola Hall is in the middle of its season of spirituality courses and I am working at full capacity or, given the ME/CFS, slightly beyond it. The courses though are something I love to be involved with-there is such a palpable sense of God at work during them.
A week ago was ‘Theology and Spiritual Accompaniment’-three days working with a group of 14 exploring some of the theological questions that surface from the group’s experience and practice of spiritual accompaniment.
2 comments March 23rd, 2006
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