The poems inspired by this journey are posted and are still rough. These poems are long. Often the stream of consciousness tends to draw out the thought longer than it ought. I do beg indulgence. In a rare little poem I wrote many years ago I note:
Is a poem once written, only once read?
Once read, ever-hidden and dead?
Not read again, then again?
Rather, I think:
Ever-read is re-written
Ever-giving, re-given
Words rise again friend,
And mean resurrection.
The following poem is long and will be further edited. I publish it as a rough piece mostly because I want to disseminate thought, and ever mostly in advance of the Synod on Synodality.
This poem (Part II) puts into limping verse the process of persecution of religion and refers it concretely to distinct episodes in history. It is not annotated. Maybe I will get around to annotating it in the future.
Sisters for the Sioux II
What is the anatomy of unholy pillage?
First Scatter,
Like the predator.
Attack the innocent in the village
Fire guns and frighten her
This is the start of the fissure.
When the air is fissile
With unholy revolution
And the threat of violent restitution
Changes the premise
Of the Holy constitution,
The weak ordained won’t matter,
These petals quickly wilt
And leave the Convent built
And fast-forget their promise.
Second go the proud.
In their heart they are the wiser
For their cleverness
To scoff at the spiritual advisor
That remains in her convent cell
And insist on the rigors of firm prayer;
The proud follow and add to the crowd,
Leave before the inevitableness
Of forced divestiture
And flee not to eat the inedible swill
Of the refectory of prison cell.
Then the reasonably strong retained
May carry on as a good daughter
Until they ask the “real” point of it.
With the nunnery in such tatter,
And weep they will but rather
Leave the commonweal
With the whippoorwill
Before they are detained for slaughter.
Then what remains?
An often baker’s dozen martyrs
Reiterative disciples of the Lord
These are the cynics’ rage:
The residual after the scatter.
Not the scatter seed as sowing
But separating the chaff
For reaping of a final age
These become the final execution stage
Of the vile.
These forever docile
They save again or reconcile
Through another shedding of the blood
For the unnecessary generation
For the necessary regeneration.
Listen to the knocking:
The knock of Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France
(Après la dispersion )
The Dialogue of Carmelites:
Pit Jacobin against religion;
Arrest the holy company of Compiègne,
In irons bind our innocence again
As shackled saints have always been.
Led to the tribunal of the tribe
Of sclerotic revolution.
And in false freedom’s diatribe
Dare declare
That rooster with the hen
The shorn-head sisters
Veiled in habits and sequestered
Enemies of Progress
Why?
Because of prayer?
It ought to deeply scare
When a cult of criminals and convicts
Give the solemn verdicts
Against the women of the convents.
And by Pilate’s throne do sentence
Force a quarantine
Detain the healed as the diseased
And unappeased
With maxillary bite
Maximilien
Of petty, pity Robespierre
Without a thought inside
Where might makes right
Slice with high incisors
Of the smirking mascot of the Reign
Of Terror
That rabid dog named
Guillotine.
Such yield of horror harvest
In the gathering basket
Meant for sheaves of wheat
Not lovely heads with veils
To roll upon the street.
These frigid Phrygian Franks
Led sisters to the gallows
Placed beauty in the casket,
And casket in the ground
In the convent of all hallows
And epilogue becomes a prologue
Once again prophetic!
It always comes around.
Power seeking fame
Power seeking to rename
Religion-use
Or faith abuse
And righteousness to frame
In rather-ruse of truth,
Disguised as Gallicantu revolution.
Blunt steel to grunt and
Steal the feminine
By the Galois ghosts on gallows.
How did this happen in 1794?
Devise wicked ceremonies,
As new as the golden calf
Strange writhing liturgies
Against the natural history
And desecrate the holy path
Of soul’s true liberty.
Spread false mottos
Of good humanity
Stir the foolish up with slogans:
Liberty, equality and fraternity
And mock and laugh
Under the rainbow canopy.
Then dispatch horror
As the cult of reason
An enlightened murder-manner
And force into a corset, freedom
And give a false shape to governance
And call it providence.
Does anything here sound familiar yet?
The second knock of the Gestapo in Fascist Germany
(Nach der Ausstreuung)
Sisters of Nowogródek!
Bless bright the star of Stars
Of grace and Mum superior
And all your réfectoire
A dozen sisters dead without a speck
For the limping legacy of Caesar.
I’d like to know
Where is the civility of power?
Was the donkey that carried Christ
Into Jerusalem named Civitas?
The blossom of the morning,
By evening, wilted flower
Loses the appeal of its sweet scent?
That fragrant promised empire
With dust and mites will blow
And sacrifice our nuns
On their illustrious funeral pyre
If you are politically indifferent.
I’ve only seen civility in prayer
And best supplied in an arcade
Of Cathedral and the convent choir.
It is the better partner
Of our cultural cascade
To handle best the hopes of nations
Than the decimating aspiration
In vented rant and false advent
That rips the veil of all humility
And resents the grace of consecration.
And how did this happen in 1945?
Devising propaganda
Purging the intelligentsia,
Twisting logic to extreme
And sing it in a military march
Or in a Church bound hymn
And proclaim it as a science.
Contrive the lie so thoughtfully
So wonder-willfully
State the lie with certainty:
Race is sacred purity.
(Or gender choice as social equity)
And follow-hallowed
Heil of Fuhrer,
To the hollow-fallowed hell of fury.
Sisters, scandal-scoff
At the oblation of the coward
It is and always will be, virgin.
Grief and disbelief.
With little or no warning:
They break our relic bones
For breakfast
As the cereal Corn Pop of their feast.
Does anything here sound familiar yet again?
Or listen to the third knock of Soviet Steel
после рассыпания
If this is not enough.
Sit more, my friends
And learn and maybe
Wiggle in discomfort.
For the Sisters of Elizabeth,
Are in the family photos
And the scraps of ages
Of faded clips from journalists
Kept in albums and pressed pages
Of a devotional tract, still Latin
For Silesia and the sages.
The fading albums echo
Yet again,
How criminal the creeds
Of anti-Christ
Will always violate
First fainted femininity,
By rampaging Red Army,
For a scarlet blade of steel
Blood alloy with the bayonet
In unrepentant, iterative
Repetitive, exploitative
Expletive hate.
And how did this happen again in 1945?
Devise a broader ideology
Of world community;
Better than before
And yet the same and worse.
Let robber loose from prison
Let them clobber those that pray.
Let the blood stains dry
On their hands like resin
Unbound and then discount,
Plunder convents and virginity
For fun and vodka
And zakuska
Expressing rude contentment
In a raunchy belch.
And light such things ablaze,
Deny debate
Discussion squelch
Of their false premise and false promise.
And not abate,
The fire of resentment.
And shudder to the bone, today
Listen to the knock, knock, knock again.
Not so fast,
Not so smug
Trust not the thug
Dressed in cravat
That crafts the political agenda.
It’s not a thing of past.
The genocide of nuns
For a rat is always rat.
It creeps today far better than the trumpet blast
Of revolution.
Where are the ossuaries?
And the relics of Scholastica
On the soil of America?
Of the hundred thousand vanished
Slow suffocated nuns
In our own vestibule of time?
Vanished without a trace
Scattered in our own face?
Here and now?
Is this the apparent positive
Dialectic of progress?
Listen! The pattern is the same again.
I see shadows of the horror past
It makes me shudder,
At the shuttered convents
From Boston to San Diego.
In just five decades of time’s rosary
We exchanged our
Currency of convents
For some petty cash in convicts,
Penitentiaries, business parks
And condos.
What method to deceive?
Slow reform and increment,
Made on global scaffold.
Laud trade above all else
In the glitter and the glamour
Of immediate mediation
And a cascade of glitter-data.
Devise narratives to blunt
The bladed implement of charity
The serrated saw of truth.
And replace morality
With vulgarity.
While we sleep, invade
Our homes with band width,
And a splendid box pervade
Festooned with rainbows
And with pride.
Surely Noah weeps
At the rubbish made of
Colored spectral covenant.
Such toothless trinkets
Of a virtual relativity
That muddles sacred femininity
In a technology of lies,
Pills for daffodils.
Is this a proper market to exchange?
Impurity for pure?
If Gresham’s law* applies for money
Bad chase out the good,
Then doesn’t that imply
A temptation of the spirit
To barter heresy for purity?
And isn’t that sin against the Holiest of Holies?
(To be continued: Sisters of the Sioux–Hope)
*Note: Gresham’s law states that bad money chases out good money; base money or bad metal chases away good money or silver. Catholics be careful! This law can also apply to spirituality. We need to be very careful and not embrace a base spirituality as a substitute spiritual currency. This is not the currency we ought to value.