Posts Tagged ‘saints’
The Holy Fool
April 1, 2019
I met my husband for the first time on April Fool’s Day twelve years ago. Living several states apart, we were introduced by mutual friends and spent three months corresponding by email and phone. When it was finally feasible for us to meet face-to-face, I planned and worried for weeks, feeling tense with emotional preparation.…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Relic”
February 9, 2018
They say the flu circulating this season begins with the sensation of having swallowed a tiny sword. For the relief of such ailments, some Catholics seek the Blessing of the Throats in February on the Feast of St. Blaise, patron saint of sufferers of throat diseases. The narrator of Matthew Thorburn’s “Relic” describes his schoolboy…
Read MoreA Conversation with Scott Cairns
October 13, 2016
This post originally appeared as web-exclusive content in Image issue 68. Scott Cairns, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as do something. Mary Kenagy Mitchell interviewed Scott Cairns…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “I Am Poured Out Like Water”
July 15, 2016
What attracts me to this poem is something deliberately absent yet evocatively present: baptism in a river. Starting from the very first line—during monastic prayer, the speaker’s mis-chanting “Lord’s forever” as “Lord’s river”—rivers are central to each vignette. There’s the creek where, as a kid, the speaker “took a girl down to the river to…
Read MoreScoliosis and the Statue of St. Francis
December 30, 2015
During a windstorm, our wooden statue of St. Francis is knocked over. I lean him back onto the uneven garden patch beside the porch but the next morning, as I am ushering my children out the door for school, I hear my daughter cry, “Oh no, St. Francis has fallen!” I get them in the…
Read MoreFor All the Saints
November 2, 2011
When I was growing up in the Catholic Church, November 1st was a Holy Day. All Saints Day, they called it. Aside from the obligatory Mass I attended, it was a day to stop, to take time out of our busy lives to remember, to pray for, and to be thankful for all the saints…
Read More