FRANCIS TAGS ALONG
Did you tag along, Saint Francis?
How did you manage jet lag?
Your protégé seemed unaffected,
a penitent from Assisi,
surviving on air,
like you at Portiuncula.
The Holy Father,
the title never was used,
just Pope, the generic,
arrived in America,
and America passed on
experienced wisdom,
even revelation, to all the world.
All people are equal,
including ones
we once made slaves
and our greed keeps globalizing,
so we aim for kindness now,
you all are our brothers and sisters,
we are no better than you.
St. Pio of Pietrelcina
September 23
The world was flogging itself
with war,
using faster technology
and speedier destruction,
with mechanized monsters
that smashed to a roadway
all barriers before them;
or hailstorms from the sky,
as lethal as hurricanes;
or sharks by sea
that swallowed shipping whole.
Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary
Though filled with uplifting happiness
disciples of Jesus pondered a riddle,
how could they make the people aware
that Mary stayed in absence,
no longer their inspiring
participant of ecclesia?
She fell asleep, we can admit,
awakening in the arms of her son.
At rest in prayer,
Saint Clare unraveled and pruned
some lines of the living word
pertaining to Mother Mary,
as at the wedding miracle
when she anticipated the Master’s sacred hour
by intervening at Cana,
when the holy Clare perceived,
in the water sanctified,
that Jesus pushed closer his hour
instead of disrupting Mary’s gracious perception
of wedding hosts run short of wine,
and then when Mary emptied out her years,
like Cana’s first-served wine,
he sanctified her jar of life,
transfiguring her body
with the bounty of eternal years,
so that the wedding banquet continued
with water jars filled to the brim
containing the wine of everlasting trust.
I vow,
I make this life-investing promise
at official seal of the Church,
before God in all his glory,
I vow to live the gospel life
by measure of the penitent Francis,
as a Capuchin friar,
and by fullness of all I hold sacred.
Based on the Holy Father’s encyclical letter
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore,
may yours be all praise, my Lord,
always, from every daughter and son of earth
and all its manifold created things,
including ones undiscovered
and yet to be named
by Adam and his descendants,
and likewise be acclaimed,
our infinitely tender Father,
by this our bountiful Mother Earth,
our common home.
Her bounty has woefully been wasted,
her waterways corrupted beyond reclaiming,
and her beauty buried in refuse,
while melting ice fields inundate
her unwary despoilers.