RELIGIOUS VOCATION

Poem for Today - Wednesday -  June 11, 2014

TO A FRIEND 

WITH A RELIGIOUS VOCATION 

Thinking of your vocation, I am filled

With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see

Within myself no wish to breed or build

Or take the three vows ringed by poverty.

And yet I have a sense,
Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry,

Of purpose. Is it merely a pretense,

A kind of scaffolding which I erect –

Half out of fear, half out of laziness?
The fitful poems come but can’t protect
The empty areas of loneliness.

You know what you must do,

So that mere breathing is a way to bless.

Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days ahead for you.

Your vows enfold you. I must make my own;
Now this, now that, each one empirical.
My poems move from feelings not yet known,

And when the poem is written I can feel

A flash, a moment’s peace.
The curtain will be drawn across the grill.

My silences are always enemies.

Yet with the same convictions that you have

(It is but your vocation that I lack),

I must, like you, believe in perfect love.
It is the dark, the dark that draws me back

Into a chaos where

Vocations, visions fail, the will grows slack

And I am stunned by silence everywhere.

© Elizabeth Jennings,

(For C.)
Painting on top: 
Three Nuns by
Dorothy Mary Braund (1926)
Australian, 1965