November 5: Looking for Blessings, Galway Kinnell, "Saint Francis and the Sow"

I do this when I feel overwhelmed.  Count my blessings.  Watch my son sleep.  Listen to my daughter sing along with the radio.  Put my arm around my wife in the middle of the night.  Remind myself that happiness is all around me.  Like a tulip bulb buried in the ground, waiting for spring.

Blessings are about possibility and hope.  It's about looking past day-to-day ugliness and finding love.

Saint Marty is feeling a little less overwhelmed this evening.  And a lot more loved.  

Saint Francis and the Sow

by:  Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Loveliness and hope

August 15: A Saint Poem, Oliver de la Paz, "Under the Stained Glass Saints"

For obvious reasons, I'm a sucker for poems about saints.  There are quite a lot of them out there, believe it or not.  One of my favorites is Galway Kinnell's "Saint Francis and the Sow."  Perhaps I'll share it with you guys some day.

I have a saint poem from Oliver de la Paz tonight.  It's got Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Thomas Aquinas.  It reminds me of my Catholic childhood, growing up under the stained glass windows among the flickering votives.

Saint Marty can almost smell the incense in these lines.

Under the Stained Glass Saints

by:  Oliver de la Paz

For squirming, Fidelito receives a pinch from his mother.  Disturbed by his yowl, the once quiet congregation sing their Aves an octave louder.

The boy, uncomfortable under the gaze of Saint Francis de Sales who writes reports on his misbehavior, rubs a welt the size of a nickel on his arm.  The hands of Thomas Aquinas, folded in prayer, frighten him too.  He thinks, if he turns his head, the fingers will spring to life and pinch his ear.  Briefly, Fidelito behaves.

But when the time comes to kneel and the padded boards come down from their hinges, Fidelito straddles one as though it were a horse.  He urges it to run far from the stream of the Saints' blue shadows.  Those praying around him bow their heads and smile.

I'm a sucker for stained glass, too