A Poem about Pope Francis

Hello All. If the Olympics gave medals for blogging the least number of times each year, I'd probably win the gold. Why? Because I took several weeks off in December and early January. Now, it’s Thursday again and I find myself unable to find the three hours I generally spend crafting the memoir story that serves as my posting. This week’s been hectic with the illness of a friend who needed help and with my own problems with Meniere’s. So I also haven’t been able to read any of your blogs.

         I’m hoping that next week life will permit me to get back to a routine that includes reading/commenting on blogs and writing a story for this blog. For now, I simply want to share two things.

1)         As you know, Time magazine chose Pope Francis as their person of the year. Below is a poem about the pope. A friend of mine, whom I’ve known for sixty years, wrote it. The two of us attended college together and we both entered Mount Saint Scholastica Monastery. I left; she stayed and I’m so thankful that she’s been able to pursue her love of writing there.

Pope Francis

He looked out at our world

and saw that it was good,

not wicked or lurking in alleys,

waiting to pounce on prey,

but wounded and scarred from battlefields

of controversy, dissention, and mistrust.

He calls for the Church to be

a “field hospital” doing triage

to stop the hemorrhaging, to bandage

the broken, to comfort the mournful,

not condemning or alienating.

Open-armed and open-hearted

Francis embraces those teetering

on the brink of poverty, trampled

by war and greed, lost

in disillusionment and darkness.

Throwing off the ermine and silk

and red shoes, abandoning

the papal palace, he reaches out

to ordinary folk with candor

and common language.

He makes the gospel speak

again to all those hungering

for the simple bread of compassion

and understanding, yearning

for a place to call home.

Barbara Mayer, OSB

October 2013

This is the second poem of Barb’s that I’ve shared with you. The first was one about the return of a number of ex-nuns, myself included, to the Mount in May 2013 to celebrate the monastery’s sesquicentennial. Click here if you’d like to read that poem.

2)         On January 26, I posted for the first time in fourteen weeks on my Sunday writing blog: Word-Crafting: a Writer’s Blog. For that posting, I reviewed Return to Canterbury, written by a fellow blogger. It is a sequel to her first book, The Christmas Village. If you have time, I hope you’ll visit my Sunday blog and read the review. Melissa Goodwin’s novel for 10-to-14-year-olds is so well written that it appeals not only to young readers, but also to those of us who’ve enjoyed a lengthy number of years!

         If all goes well with the weather and the barometer and my friend, whose health is not so good right now, I’ll return next Monday to reading blogs and next Thursday to sharing with you another convent story. Peace.

A Review of Weeds

The songs my mother sang to me were the first poems I heard as a child. The lyrics of many of those songs remain with me. I still sing them as I drive. Fill the dishwasher. Vacuum up the cats’ fur from the carpet.

            My mom sang poetry; my dad recited it to me as nursery rhymes. I was “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” who was asked, “How does your garden grow?” I was that rascal Jack, nimbly jumping over a candlestick.

            My grandmother was “Old Mother Hubbard [who] went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone.” And that dog was Smokey with whom my grandmother lived, or Kentucky, my young brother’s dog.

            Songs, nursery rhymes, and then in fifth grade the required memorizing of a new poem each week: “The Owl and the Pussy Cat,” “Little Orphant Annie,” and “The Modern Hiawatha,” which was by far my favorite and which I still delight in reciting today—much to my listeners’ chagrin—some sixty-six years later.

Since those fifth grade days of being exposed to a wide range of poetic language, I’ve read and responded to poems from poets of both the past and the present. Two bloggers—Penny and Teresa Evangeline—have introduced me to a number of contemporary poets who have enriched my life in the past two years. Repeatedly poets reveal to me the light at the end of the tunnel. More often they help me realize the deep down humanity and thirst for goodness that is the essence of each of us.

And so today I want to tell you about Weeds, a book of poetry I’ve just completed by a blogger many of you may know: McGuffy Ann Morris. I’ve had the book on my bedside table for over a month now, picking it up each evening, reading a poem, and then considering what it offers me: the truths about my own experience of life.

In Weeds, Morris offers us the wisdom of the years she’s spent here on this planet we call Earth. It is a wisdom hard won and for that reason treasured. She is both observer and muse. Here are just three samples of her poetic observations:

            From “Book”

            Life is an open book

            Each person a character

            pasted on a page of time.

            From “Battle”

            I go back in time,

            the battlefield of memories.

            I need to recapture

            Moments lost, moments stolen,

            Looking for myself

            As I really am, not as you

            Perceive me to be.

            From “Median”

            Reflections fade into shadows.

            What I once was has faded;

            What I am yet to be becomes clear.

            I did not choose to be here,

            To be a part of this.

            Forever now will I be both

            Reflection and shadow.

           

In Weeds, Morris moves back and forth between the antipodes of life—from difficult to glorious. As a reader I saw her struggles as well as her triumphs. And yet, as with all poems that come from the depths of the human experience, I also found myself for she presents the realities of our lifelong journey through time and space, memory and experience.

The only slight hesitancy I had in reading Weeds is that I’ve come to enjoy unrhymed poetry more than rhymed. Several of Morris’ poems rhyme and when I first read them I found myself testing out the rhymes rather than reading for what the poem had to offer me in terms of my own experience of life. But as soon as I reread without stressing rhyme, I discerned the message that existed—for me—within the poem.

That is, I believe, a sign of good poetry—that it speaks to the human condition as each of us live out that condition in our own lives. I encourage you to read Weeds and to find yourself within its poems.

As Morris says on the book cover of Weeds, which I believe is her anthem to life, “There comes a time to assess and to weed our lives, in order to find value in the harvest. This book is a culmination of personal lifetime experiences and observations. To each, their own.”