A Litany for Courage and the Seasons

The sleep of poets is but a travelogue of a dream,
Mars tonight and the crab nebulae tomorrow.
The voice of God, the colorless silences
are his paragraphs, Dark holes, the dimples of his mind.
O come morning with your vivid dawn
and your rain and winds, to see if you can rival
the augury and majesty of dream.

After a hard winter of work spring comes at last,
with warming winds which find even the deepest culverts.
In my heart St. Francis is stirring.
His blindness and the remedy of hot irons disrupts me,
as I walk along this country road.
I wonder what God would have done to prepare a man for that,
Both the pain and the disfiguration.
I ask St. Francis to pray for me because
I need the recommendation of a good man.
The sky is blue with no clouds.
The freshets gurgle pleasantly beneath
the sounds of countless peepers and new birds.
I walk along briskly remembering my body,
trying to awaken it from a long chill,
as though it had been asleep under the snow.
The sun surrounds me with a flowing light
and shows me the configurations and colors
of things I have come to know and love.
I wonder why my own blindness wasn’t healed
by this transfiguration.
Blessed Francis, guide me through my awakening
while my spirit is still heavy with sleep
and while I have trouble focusing my eyes.
Speaking is a way of knowing Psalms from a lover’s soul
on the heart’s hearth newly glowing like ignited coal.
The fire’s brand along the temples and the smell of burning hair
the love of God impeached the troubles Brother Ass imprisoned there
Scarred and blistered and blinded still, with ulcers on both feet and hands
Blessed Francis, share your loving with another blinded man.