THE BRIDE FROM THE SEA
The old stories were deftly handed around
at christenings, the week-long observances
at weddings, and the long vigils at wakes,
with the elderly stiffly upright in chairs
and the yawning children around their feet.
They told the bits they knew of the many
passed down from before and after the sea passage.
They told of the selkies, the tribe of sea people
who swam the rough waters beside fishing boats
with their great brown eyes on the men at the nets.
And for love of some of these fishermen, selkies
were said to slip out of their smooth, mottled skin
and take the shape of the lovely daughters of Eve,
unable to return to their tribe in the roiling waters
if their shed hide were hidden and kept from them.
In the first day when the family lost one of its own,
they opened the cedar chest she kept always locked,
saying the combination was lost, years after they buried
the golden body of her young husband who died untimely
from some hole in his heart, and put him under the earth.
There in a bundle of crinkling wrapping paper was folded
the wedding dress she wore, when she came from her people,
a dress that shimmered in the grey light under the eves,
as delicate and strong as a fine net washed in the sea
with the whiteness of the moon pulling and curling the waves.
It seemed stained by the mortal condition of many tears
shed for long from her great brown eyes at the loss,
and still felt some dampness, even locked in that attic box.
So they dressed her gently in its pale, yellowing sateen,
and dug a grave, returning her at last to her people.
A MANUSCRIPT OF MERCIES
The monastic concert band
snug in a cracked egg
a medieval painter made
shows a basket of birds
alive and one cocked-up fowl
with a snake on a bare twig.
These are the calendar marks
of prophecies and miracles,
when roof thatch and bed straw
near a guttering candle
could burn down a storybook town.
Epidemics easily broke
out in the wake of hunger.
Hell gasped. Prayers
or spells, and saints in heaven,
who took an interest at times
in the fate of crops and cattle,
were kept friends by offerings.
Holy water, sprinkled widely,
warded off demons, like flies,
from cradles and marriage beds.
A drop of Christ's blood,
sold for the cost of a good farm.
Men gathered indulgences,
and scripts of forgiveness. And a thorn,
bent pin, or bristle applied
to a crude cloth figure
were things we held in despair.
And all of these are mercies.
WHEN GOODNESS UNKNOWN IS KNOWN
Goodness breathes upon us, a miracle we've felt
comes close to share with us our feeble frame,
making visible the Word that links the earth
and the bright abyss of heaven at the sound.
A holy invitation tumbles out our joy
together like the Cana wedding feast,
where friend and stranger tasted goodness,
and water then became the better wine.
In Dante's ageless verse I heard a soul
say: "Pilgrim, here is your abiding city."
So lift your eyes and see, when day is done,
that Goodness moves the stars and blazing sun.
We feel out hearts of stone will roll away
in prayer, and in the breaking of the bread --
a mystery of praise on angels' tongues --
the food that Goodness feeds us on the way.
We have become the story that we tell.
Goodness touched our world, its inner wounds,
with words that heal and not deride or shame --
while Goodness calls each one of us by name.
A PRAYER AT AN EXHIBITION
~ the art of Piero della Francesca
Here curators assembled
a collection of masterpieces,
several panel paintings
displaying the solemnity
and mastery of light
from the hand of Piero.
Lofty, unemotional,
outside the historic
flash of existence,
he captured stillness,
and ever-present eternity
like earth's first morning.
The partial reredos
is missing its central
panel, perhaps once an
enthroned Madonna and Child --
a warm, local farm girl
and her alert, chubby baby.
The ones left here are saints
with their gnarled feet, flat
on a marble floor,
while all of heaven
is present -- its pale air
flooding around us.
On the rich fabrics
Piero pointed the light
to fall on seed pearls
or absorbed into heavy
folds of brocade robes,
making them monumental.
These light-eating colours
were aligned, reflecting
like landscapes along
a river's edge where nothing
hears the soul howling
in the narrow lane nearby.
But near another Virgin's direct,
frontal gaze, in the holiness
of silence, whispers along
these galleries come from angels
around her, as one points
to direct our wandering eyes
at a child, clothed in the sorrows
of our borrowed flesh.
Child, your gesture makes
my body feel at last real,
as it reaches, like light
that opens my blind eyes.
But like the sun and death,
no one can look long
directly at such life itself.
Here looking is a prayer.
Let me hold you a moment,
and protect you, O little God.
GERONTION ADDRESSES GOD
The shortened duration of days
we call life, endured,
is nearly spent, the edge
of what is completely unknown.
I wait in an open doorway,
a place of entrance and exit,
undressed, arriving and leaving,
and set to quickly embark,
but pause, to finish reading
this book with its old-fashioned text
of my life, changing each moment,
like a feather that floats on the breath.
A singular day remains
that calls for me to be honest --
no simulacra of lies.
It is not the darkness but light
that exposes my face and the terror
that comes from under the skin,
and the white in a startled eye
that cleaves the evening shadows
as I see the unknown approach.
In the time left, pity
is all I can claim. Pity
my need to love you again,
to hold your beauty this close
for even a slanted hour,
no longer living untouched,
as the old are but gingerly touched,
never told that they are beautiful,
as they stare out of hungry eyes
and sit at length without notice,
or talk too long to themselves
or to someone who aches to escape.
I will rise in perpetual light,
the familiar book unfinished,
as the trees glister with stars.
I have begged for as much as I can
to prepare for the journey ahead --
to offer my slender love to you.
Royal Rhodes is a poet who taught religious studies in the global context for almost forty years. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals, and also have found a home in the past in Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
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