A POEM FOR OLD AGE?

One of my recent favorite poems is by another nun, Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, more commonly known as JESSICA POWERS.  She has been hailed as one of America's greatest religious poets.

She was born in 1905 in Mauston, Wisconsin, to a pioneer family of Scottish heritage. By the time Jessica had turned 13, she lost both her older sister (TB at age 16) and father (heart attack hauling coal to parish priest).

She graduated from Mauston High School in 1922 and attended Marquette University for a year studying journalism. She then worked in Chicago before returning to care for her family after the death of her mother from 1925 to 1936. During this time she published over a hundred poems, many reflecting her background growing up in rural Wisconsin.

She moved to New York in 1937, where she shared a home with the philosopher Anton Pegis, a professor at Fordham University, and his wife Jessica, a writer, and helped care for their children. Jessica grew intellectually and spiritually through her contacts with other writers who were part of the Catholic Revival, and her poems began to take on the contemplative, mystical quality characterizing her work in later years. 

Her first book, The Lantern Burns, appeared in 1939. Drawn to a cloistered religious vocation she entered  the Milwaukee community of the Carmel of Mother of God as a postulant   (the first in this foundation- see photo to left- she is in white veil)  in 1941. On April 25, 1942, she received the habit of the Carmelites and was given the religious name of Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit.

The Carmelites moved to nearby Pewaukee in 1958. There Jessica Powers spent the remainder of her life, dying of a stroke on August 18, 1988.

Sister Miriam  has influenced a wide audience of American Catholic and non-Catholic readers on a popular level in newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals for over sixty years. 

My favorite poem- perhaps written in old age (?): 

SUFFERING

All that day long I spent the hours with suffering.
I woke to find her sitting by my bed.
She stalked my footsteps while time slowed to timeless,
tortured my sight, came close in what was said.

She asked no more than that, beneath unwelcome,
I might be mindful of her grant of grace.
I still can smile, amused, when I remember
How I surprised her when I kissed her face.

Other Poems:

TO LIVE WITH THE SPIRIT

To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener.
It is to keep the vigil of mystery,
earthless and still.
One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit,
strange as the wind’s will.

The soul that walks where the wind of the Spirit blows
turns like a wandering weather-vane toward love.
It may lament like Job or Jeremiah,
echo the wounded hart, the mateless dove.
It may rejoice in spaciousness of meadow
that emulates the freedom of the sky.

Always it walks in waylessness, unknowing;
it has cast down forever from its hand
the compass of the whither and the why.

To live with the Spirit of God is to be a lover.
It is becoming love, and like to Him
toward Whom we strain with metaphors of creatures:
fire-sweep and water-rush and the wind’s whim.
The soul is all activity, all silence;
and though it surges Godward to its goal,
it holds, as moving earth holds sleeping noonday,
the peace that is the listening of the soul.

Take Your Only Son  (from:  The House at Rest)

None guessed our nearness to the land of vision,
not even our two companions to the mount.
That you bore wood and I, by grave decision,
fire and sword, they judged of small account.

Speech might leap wide to what were best unspoken
and so we plodded, silent, through the dust.
I turned my gaze lest the heart be twice broken
when innocence looked up to smile its trust.

O love far deeper than a lone begotten,
how grievingly I let your words be lost
when a shy question guessed I had forgotten
a thing so vital as the holocaust.

Hope may shout promise of reward unending
and faith buy bells to ring its gladness thrice,
but these do not preclude earth's tragic ending
and the heart shattered in its sacrifice.

Not beside Abram does my story set me.
I built the altar, laid the wood for flame.
I stayed my sword as long as duty let me,
and then alas, alas, no angel came.