ST. CLARE

Poem for Today - August 11, 2014

A VISION OF ST. CLARE

Girl for whom the job came as a crack in rockface, the sudden

tomb-slip turned all door.

So that when she saw the lily spell itself there, seraphed on the wall

of her father’s house, she knelt

down for the rapture, the rupture, and started to dig. Wall through

          which the dead in those days

were carried for burial, delivered into, they prayed. His secrets

held deeper than dirt.
On the night of the rock loosening beneath her fingers to gravel,

to seconds falling ordinary

an hourglass, the little sands cinch-waisted, Palm Sunday, in Assisi,

in the family house,

1212 A. D.., she listened to the mice scurry and flirt in the hallway,

then to the one dove’s sound

of silken pebbles tumbling in its throat. Turns out later they asked,

for what, the mother and father,

getting up for the scream, running to find her there in rubble, blood

          rivering steep down her arms

by then, instant the wall fell, and first light entered, and she stepped

clean through.

 OOOOO

Pimone Triplett, from The Price of Light, Copyright © 2005, page 465 in Language for a New Century, edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, W.W. Norton Company, New York, London, 2008