May 13: Our Lady of Fatima

Manly Man Poetry Night. My pastor friend and I were at Big Boy by about 8:30 p.m. The evening had been a little stressful because we had a house showing at 6:30 p.m., so I couldn't bring my son home to put him to sleep until well past 7 p.m. My wife took my daughter to her dance class. I know I haven't written about selling our house for a while. It's still for sale. People are still coming to look at it, at least once or twice every couple of weeks. Make me an offer. I'll throw in a garden hose and a copy of Alice Sebold's Almost Moon for free. (That book is the only novel I have ever read that I can say I absolutely hated. I could find absolutely no redeeming qualities in it. I loved Sebold's first two books--Lucky and The Lovely Bones. I've used both as texts in classes I've taught. Almost Moon belongs in the kindling pile for starting campfires. In my humble opinion.)

I didn't have onion rings tonight, and neither did my friend. He had chili cheese fries. It was a pretty crappy, rainy, drizzly day, and the temperature remained in the low forties. So he was looking for something to warm himself. I, on the other hand, was looking for an ice cream fix. I ordered a chocolate chip cookie, hot fudge sundae. Both my friend and I were quite satisfied by our menu selections.

Next week, my friend is gone to a church conference, and the Thursday after that is book club. The final Thursday he's here will be another book club meeting (we moved it up a week so he could attend before he moved to his new church downstate). So, after this blog, there will be only two more Manly Man Poetry Nights with my friend.

May 13 is dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima. In 1917, in a small city called Fatima in Portugal, the Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children. The children ranged in ages from ten years old to seven. From May 13 to October 13 of that year, Mary appeared to them on six occasions. The final manifestation on October 13 was accompanied by the miracle described in the poem below. In various accounts, the event was witnessed by 30,000 to 100,000 people, and, despite all scientific attempts to explain the astronomical oddity, no satisfactory theory has been given. The theories range from mass hallucination to stratospheric dust.

I'd been thinking about this miracle ever since I realized that Manly Man Poetry Night fell on the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima. I always love reading accounts of modern miracles where the scientific community scrambles to provide absolutely ridiculous explanations for the unexplainable. It's almost as if nothing can be taken on faith. Faith is somehow equated with ignorance, and in the 21st century, with i-Pods, i-Phones, and i-Pads in nearly every home, ignorance is just unacceptable.

I, on the other hand, could never survive without faith. Simply putting pen to paper, composing a poem or essay or short story or blog, is an act of faith. Launching these posts into the ether of the World Wide Web is akin to stuffing a note in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean. You hope someone eventually finds the bottle, reads the note, and comes to find you on your desert island. Then there's the faith of living with mental illness. I get up every morning and go to work with the faith that my wife is fine and able to function normally. There's also the faith of believing that my wife's addictions are under control, that she's not sneaking off to the local library to use the Internet.

Getting out of bed is an act of faith. Driving to work--faith. Eating breakfast--faith. Answering the phone--faith. Taking a breath--faith.

Let me boil it down for you: life is an act of faith.

That's what the poem I wrote for Manly Man Poetry Night is all about. The exercise itself comes, again, from The Practice of Poetry. It's called "One's-Self, En-Masse." Poet Michael Pettit says to "write a description of two or three paragraphs...in which you describe one particular member or element of a set...The challenge is to perceive the qualities of the group, and to distinguish what makes an individual member of that group both a part of it and apart from it." Now, obviously, I didn't limit myself to two or three paragraphs, but aside from that, I think I followed the guidelines pretty well. So, without further adieu:

O Milagre do Sol
(Miracle of the Sun)

Fatima, Portugal
October 13, 1917

We gathered in the fields of Cova da Iria, in the rain, so many of us that Christ himself couldn't have fed us all with fish and rolls. Peasants and monks. Scientists and soldiers. Faithful and faithless. We waited as clouds pissed on our praying heads, baptized us in mud, made our wool coats heavy as the sea. In the distance, the children, like three tiny crosses, stood, gazed upward. Even in the leaden morning, their faces shone like polished copper. We recited the rosary, sang "Ave Maria," laughed at old women with faces like dried figs who beat their breasts, sobbed about the end of the world.

I came as a poet, artist, voice of reason crying out in a desert of goat herders. I came to watch, listen, write a letter to the world about the magic of manure at Fatima. To be the way, the truth in this mob of garlic eaters, 100,00 strong.

Near noon. Silence. A church bell started to toll, hollow as whale song. The screams began.

Clouds parted, gave way to a silver sun that rolled and danced. It crossed the sky, as if thrown from one invisible child to another. Back and forth it bounced, fell, rebounded. Turned bloody. White as my grandfather's head. Blue. Salamander green. Yellow as harvest wheat. The unseen children kept tossing it. Up. Down. West. South. North. East.

We rolled on the ground. Ran for town. Fell on our knees. Ripped our clothing. Cried, screamed our mea culpas. For ten minutes. For six hundred seconds of fire, rapture, second coming.

Then, the sun was back in the heavens. We stood. Rooted. Panting. Saved.

I, the poet, after hours of sodden doubt, gazed into clear sky for the first time. My clothes, hair, skin warm as my mother's just-baked bread.