Startled when a living eye appeared
To gaze beneath the polished marble stone
I stood enthralled, astonished. Then I feared
My eager tools might ravage facial bone
Or sacred flesh within the supple layered
Features of this rock. The monotone
Of day in day out prayer had persevered
On God who said this unsexed haggard crone,
My stony privacy, should yield to grace,
A muse called Chastity. Her gentle smile
Should bring me comfort still. And now a face
Of neither cynicism nor of guile
Accompanies my solitude; and eyes
Aglow with blessings solace yestersighs.
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I am a Conventual Franciscan priest living at Mount Saint Francis, IN. Since my ordination in 1975 I've served in Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Louisiana and Kentucky, plus a brief time in Melbourne Australia.
At this time I am one of several chaplains at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, KY.
Catholics believe a word became flesh and lived among us. How could I not love words?
I might say I love poetry but poetry is something like computers. I may know how to use one computer program but I don’t understand all computer programs. Likewise I may enjoy one poem; I might take delight in the poetry of one author, but I don’t love all poems, nor do I like all poets.
I enjoy the sound of words. I love their multiple meanings and diverse functions. I love the subtlety of words. They are powerful, fascinating, eminently useful and essentially spiritual. They are breath shaped into sound.
How many millennia passed before the human creature discovered the principle of a sentence? It is as perfect as pi. It must be something sprung from Plato’s ideal world of forms.
Poetry explores the meaning of words and sentences, stretching these entirely human constructs until they speak divinely, even until they break open, revealing the spirit that forms them.
Poems I have written.
Poetic forms and subjects
- Ballad (2)
- Decasyllabic rhyming couplets (1)
- Double Dactyl (1)
- Ecology (2)
- Franciscan Crown (4)
- Free Verse (7)
- haiku series (1)
- Heroic Couplets (1)
- Ode (3)
- Pantoum (8)
- Personal (3)
- Philosophical (9)
- prose poem (1)
- Religion (4)
- Scripture (12)
- Sestina (10)
- Short Story (1)
- Sonnet (16)
- Terza Rima (1)
- The Vow of Chastity (9)
- Villanelle (2)
- Wreath (6)
Poems by Ken
About the author
I am a Conventual Franciscan priest living at Mount Saint Francis, IN. Since my ordination in 1975 I've served in Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Louisiana and Kentucky, plus a brief time in Melbourne Australia.
At this time I am one of several chaplains at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Louisville, KY.
Catholics believe a word became flesh and lived among us. How could I not love words?
I might say I love poetry but poetry is something like computers. I may know how to use one computer program but I don’t understand all computer programs. Likewise I may enjoy one poem; I might take delight in the poetry of one author, but I don’t love all poems, nor do I like all poets.
I enjoy the sound of words. I love their multiple meanings and diverse functions. I love the subtlety of words. They are powerful, fascinating, eminently useful and essentially spiritual. They are breath shaped into sound.
How many millennia passed before the human creature discovered the principle of a sentence? It is as perfect as pi. It must be something sprung from Plato’s ideal world of forms.
Poetry explores the meaning of words and sentences, stretching these entirely human constructs until they speak divinely, even until they break open, revealing the spirit that forms them.
1 comment:
Pygmalion appears on the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is a sculptor who, disinterested in the women in his own society, creates a perfect image of an ideal woman in stone. The gods, hearing his prayer and knowing his frustration, reward him by transforming the stone to human flesh. She is named Galatea. This is one of the few stories in Ovid’s book that ends happily.
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