FIRST CONFESSION 

AND COMMUNION 

Poem for Today - February 16, 2014

FIRST CONFESSION

Blood thudded in my ears. I scuffed,

          Steps stubborn, to the tell tale booth

Beyond whose curtained portal coughed

          The robed repositor of truth.

The slat shot back. The universe

          Bowed down his cratered dome to hear

Enumerated my each curse,

          The sip snitched from my old man’s beer,

My sloth pride envy lechery,

          The dime held hack from Peter’s Pence

With which I’d bribed my girl to pee

          That I might spy her instruments.

Hovering scale-pans when I’d done

          Settled their balance slow as silt

While in the restless dark I burned

          Bright as a brimstone in my guilt

Until as one feeds birds he doled

          Seven Our Fathers and a Hail

Which I to double-scrub my soul

          Intoned twice at the altar rail

Where Sunday in seraphic light

          I knelt, as full of grace as most,

And  stuck my tongue out at the priest:

          A fresh roost for the Holy Ghost.

- X. J. Kennedy

(Doubleday & Company, Inc. 

for “First Confession,” 

© 1951 by X. J. Kennedy -- 

found on page 159 

in New Coasts & Strange Harbors, 

discovering Poems, 

selected by Helen Hill 

and Agnes Perkins, 

Thomas Y. Crowell Company, NY, 1974)

Photograph by Georges Jansoon, 
September 16, 2006,
Confessional Boxes in 
Cathedral of Santiago
de Compastela, Spain