An informal survey of friends and family shows that the last week or so has been hard on things–people, feelings, plants, you name it. So here is a poem about being less hard on things (and ourselves). Because “sometimes it is necessary/ to reteach a thing its loveliness.”
(I’ve posted this once before, but just the first half–since apparently I didn’t want my blessings mixed up with pig teats. Now, I think the sow part makes it, especially the “great broken heart.”)
Saint Francis And The Sow
by Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.