Four poems about Francis of Assisi
Open mic: hear Grant Fraser read his four poems about Francis of Assisi, live from the Eureka Street studio. Listen
1. Sistered by Death
For some there are vanities that rise up as rags,
And declare their holy poverty to the world;
For others, language is a dazzling vestment
Worn close to the skin;
But you, Francis, kept your words and your poverty
At a sacred distance, so that in each dawn,
You could rise like a swimmer
And breach the water afresh,
Hair bubbling with curls.
And thus, in the time that you made your own,
You could seek the light of life in a swaying viper's eyes,
Know that in the curving of a thorn
Begins the poem of the rose,
And hear amongst the best of birdsong
A small motet of crows.
In all that you astounded, so you confounded,
Until, at the end, you lay down upon the earth,
And, sistered by death, simply shed your life,
Lay inert,
Espoused to dust,
As quiet as lightning.
2. St Francis and the Leper's kiss
And oh the Leper waits within the silence of a child;
The dulled edges of his universe are like a balm of air:
he is unstung by any frost, indifferent to all crackling fire.
And Francis comes, a pale faced young man,
Head roughly shaved, down at heel.
He bears a Demon on his back
which breathes a fog into Francis' eyes,
Burdens him,
Hobbles his knees, stoops his heart.
The Demon has the face of a saint.
The Leper reaches for his bell,
But as the young man approaches
A great sigh comes from him,
And, rising up from his stooped demeanour,
He flings the Demon from his back
And sheds the shining carapace
Which falls like a cloak to the ground.
And Francis, older than he first appeared,
His pale face coursed by time, leans to the Leper,
And reaching his arm about the shoulders of the Leper,
Pauses to look closely into his face,
Then kisses his proffered cheek,
Its grey meticulous skin.
3. The Falling
When you fell from the grace of the world
You were lost to its cool linens,
Its glamour of steel,
Its ancestries of faith and hope,
And its promises of death made comfortable
In ossuaries of patterned bones.
When you fell, at the first, you were undone:
You were a moth inside a bell
Soundlessly dusting the bronze,
A worm on stone
Yawning convulsions to the sun.
Then you fell into
The yield of your life
And began to bell the sounds
Of all those stranger words
That shimmer within the grammar of Christ:
To love beyond reckoning,
To forgive audaciously,
To make of poverty an act of grace.
4. Saint Francis and the Wolves
Saint Francis