Killybegs: St Mary’s Parish Church
Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 11:09 pm
Killybegs: St Mary’s Parish Church
I
It weighs on me these memories of her;
what was, is gone, what might have been, unknown
and unknowable. One brief moment
of encounter fires and explodes and ripples
and ripples and still the heart aches and is storm-
tossed; out of the depths of a forgetfulness
where there is no forgetting – a memory
alive now and quaking. She sat and prayed
here, maybe thought of me and added
a special blessing for my wellbeing. Does she
think of me now? Does she wonder what became
of me? With iridescent callousness
you have placed in our hearts so much capacity
to feel, to love, but also loss and its pain.
II
Above the tabernacle in stained glass grey and white,
St. Catherine leans on the altar of crucifixion,
exhausted, waiting with stigmata and crown
of thorns, pleading, hoping. But you, past pain, you knew
it too: God- abandonment, hanging there the promise
scourged and cleansed of any and all deceit, Christ
of the sea and the black depths of memory never
to be relived or relieved, tangled into that thorny
crown clutching at the scutch of hope, the heart
as yet unhealed and maybe unhealable.
I
It weighs on me these memories of her;
what was, is gone, what might have been, unknown
and unknowable. One brief moment
of encounter fires and explodes and ripples
and ripples and still the heart aches and is storm-
tossed; out of the depths of a forgetfulness
where there is no forgetting – a memory
alive now and quaking. She sat and prayed
here, maybe thought of me and added
a special blessing for my wellbeing. Does she
think of me now? Does she wonder what became
of me? With iridescent callousness
you have placed in our hearts so much capacity
to feel, to love, but also loss and its pain.
II
Above the tabernacle in stained glass grey and white,
St. Catherine leans on the altar of crucifixion,
exhausted, waiting with stigmata and crown
of thorns, pleading, hoping. But you, past pain, you knew
it too: God- abandonment, hanging there the promise
scourged and cleansed of any and all deceit, Christ
of the sea and the black depths of memory never
to be relived or relieved, tangled into that thorny
crown clutching at the scutch of hope, the heart
as yet unhealed and maybe unhealable.