Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Saints

Some say this world of trouble

Is the only one we need

But I’m waiting for that morning

When the new world is revealed.

Oh, when the saints go marching in,

When the saints go marching in,

Oh Lord, I want to be in that number,

When the saints go marching in!

(quote from a Louis Armstrong's version.)

Wheel of Fortune with scenes from
the life of Saint Theophilus the Penitent. 

Midweek Motif ~ Saints 

Today, our minds may be on saints (All Saints Day), our dearly departed (Day of the Dead), or living persons we venerate, or not.  Who is (or was) a saintly presence to you?  How does the idea of sainthood enter your life?

Your Challenge:  In a new poem, narrate an encounter with a saint.

Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi in 1940.

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Saint’s Day Triolet: Saint Anthony

BY DEBORAH PAREDEZ

When no one else would listen, Saint Anthony

preached seaward, his words fishnet for the lost

souls of the heretics. Caught up in despair, we plea

to the one who will listen: Saint Anthony,

please return Tía’s teeth or the misplaced key 

to our bolted hopes. Patron retriever of all we’ve tossed 

when no one else would. Listen, Saint Anthony,

teach us to steward this world, all our netted loss.

(Used by permission.)

Saint Judas

James Arlington Wright

When I went out to kill myself, I caught

A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.

Running to spare his suffering, I forgot

My name, my number, how my day began,

How soldiers milled around the garden stone

And sang amusing songs; how all that day

Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone

Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,

Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope

Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:

Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,

The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,

I held the man for nothing in my arms.

St. Francis and the Sow, Mollie Hosmer-Dillard (2012)
(Used with Permission)

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excerpt from Saint Francis and the Sow

BY GALWAY KINNELL

. . . . 

as Saint 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 sheer 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.

The Singing Girl

by Joyce Kilmer      (For the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, S.J.)

There was a little maiden
In blue and silver drest,
She sang to God in Heaven
And God within her breast.

It flooded me with pleasure,
It pierced me like a sword,
When this young maiden sang: "My soul
Doth magnify the Lord."
The stars sing all together
And hear the angels sing,
But they said they had never heard
So beautiful a thing.

Saint Mary and Saint Joseph,
And Saint Elizabeth,
Pray for us poets now
And at the hour of death.

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Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—


Next week Sumana's Midweek Motif will be ~  Silence.