May 17: Croagh Patrick, Bigfoot Stone, Poem from "Kyrie"

It has been a busy day of Zoom church and walking my dog and grocery shopping.  Most of this evening has been taken up with responding to an editor of a journal that is publishing a couple of my poems in its next issue.

And now, as I sit in my kitchen, relaxing with a wine cooler and thinking about work tomorrow, I'm staring at a present a friend gave to me for Christmas two years ago.  She brought it all the way back from Ireland, where she found it on Croagh Patrick, one of the holiest places in that green country.  It's the mountain where Saint Patrick fasted for 40 days in 441 A.D.  The gift is a stone, but it bears a brown marking that looks incredibly like Bigfoot.  My friend found it as she was hiking the mountain, and she immediately thought of me when she saw it.  I have been working on a manuscript of Bigfoot poems for a few years now.  My friend tucked the rock into her backpack and hauled it back to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

So, today's miracle is this stone and the friendship it symbolizes.  I am blessed with people in my life who care about me a great deal.

And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

 . . . and a poem I give thanks for . . .

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

How we survived:  we locked the doors
and let nobody in.  Each night we sang.
Ate only bread in a bowl of buttermilk.
Boiled the drinking water from the well,
clipped our hair to the scalp, slept in steam.
Rubbed our chests with camphor, backs
with mustard, legs and thighs with fatback
and buried the rind.  Since we had no lambs
I cut the cat's throat, Xed the door
and put the carcass out to draw the flies.
I raised an upstairs window and watched them go--
swollen, shiny, black, green-backed, green-eyed--
fleeing the house, taking the sickness with them.