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POETRY
Finding Loose Change
Swiftly mounted up; the water reached to the
mountains. - Epic of Gilgamesh
You need to know I moved your stuff into my house -
in case you wonder who took
books and bookcases, highboy, footstool,
dishes, rugs - still good stuff, you would say,
still some life
left - into the west room whose blue walls you liked best, the
artistes room,
you teased, with its chaise longue,
oriental rugs from the church rummage sale.
I filled the wooden
trunk with your pictures, papers, trinkets, letters from me.
Inside my blouse, your silver cross the bishop blessed at Confirmation,
promising to outsmart
the end of the world with a ritual slap to your
cheek. From the face of heavens Moon,
you watch Earthrise,
Earthset, sea-swept phases luminous as a thousand moons.
In your
dusty Book of Alchemy, a green lion melts raw sun in his mouth, then
spits the ripe seed
of pure gold - your mothers rings,
bracelet. In the gruff pockets of your jacket -
Harris tweed, one
luxury you allowed yourself - I find loose change - pennies
to buy
our passage across the River Jordan.
- Martha M. Vertreace Chicago
That the Bones You Have Crushed May Thrill
From a Footnote in Wm. James Varieties of Religious
Experience
A great Being of Power was traveling through the sky
his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his
pathway.
The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of
innumerable people close to one another and I was one.
He moved in
a straight line and each part of the streak or flash came into its
short conscious existence only that he might travel
I seemed to be
directly under the foot of God and I thought he was grinding his own
life up out of my pain.
Then I saw that what he had been
trying with all his might to do was to change his course to bend the
line of lightning to which he was tied in the direction in which he wanted
to go.
I felt my flexibility, and helplessness and knew that he
would succeed. He bended me turning his corner by means of my hurt
hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest
point of this as he passed, I saw.
I understood for a moment
things I have now forgotten things that no one could remember while
retaining sanity.
The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember
thinking as I woke, that had he made it an acute or right angle I
should have both suffered and seen still more and probably
should have died.
- Judith Robbins Whitefield, Maine
News of a Favorite Students Death
The dwarfed magnolia by the curving path That crosses
the campus lawn was a favorite Of his, lover of trees and learning. The
spring he took his honors, and was gone, We stood beside it talking of what
might come To pass for him in other springs, elsewhere. For several of
them, he returned, sharing His even newer honors and the love he found
With someone like himself, another bookish Lover of trees. Their bond
confounded Town and family - something wrong there With both of them,
only to be righted By their rightfully prolonged dying, his And his,
failing to respond to all the newest Experimental drugs. And now the
letter, Scrolled in my hand like tight magnolia Buds never to flower,
frozen after too warm A fall. In the barred top floor of Science Hall,
lights have shone out over early dark, And I turn my eyes away from where
the laboratory Animals wait in their cages to be experimented
on.
- Nancy G. Westerfield Kearney, Neb.
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1999 in POETRY
Poems should be limited to about 50 lines and preferably typed.
Please send poems to NCR POETRY, 115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City MO
64111-1203. Or via e-mail to poetry@natcath.org or fax (816)
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please include your Social Security number.
National Catholic Reporter, March 31,
2000
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