it is her oscillation between the literal, symbolic, allegorical and even anagogic worlds that gives her sparse poetry it’s strange richness.Porter's poems lead me to consider anew the most ordinary of things as objects of delight and avenues of faith. The title poem calls all of us to listen in a new way to voices in and around our world.
An Altogether Different Language
There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion
Already old eight hundred years ago.
It was abandoned and in disrepair
But it was called St. Mary of the Angels
For it was known to be the haunt of angels,
Often at night the country people
Could hear them singing there.
What was it like, to listen to the angels,
To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices
Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion
In hymns of joy?
No one has told us,
Perhaps it needs another language
That we have still to learn,
An altogether different language.
In this same volume her poem For My Son Johnny talks about the life and death of her retarded son and of her failure to fully understand or respond to his life.
Her poem Native Americans places the life Jesus in our common context:
Blue eggshells
Empty in the grass,
On the rough-coated hills
Translucent,
The little pasture-rose.
Eagle’s shadow
Sweeping the high pasture,
Wordless gospel.
Older than the sun
And younger than the dew,
Poor as the larks
He came into the world
And walked from town to town
Without a stick or sandals
Carrying his new fire.
And today I saw him out on the street
In front of the post office
Tired out, young,
About the age he was
The day they killed him,
Native pastor
Of a small parish
Up on the reservation
He stood there listening
To an old Indian woman,
One of his people
One of his disinherited
And cheated people.
Eagle’s shadow
Crossing the high pasture
Silent gospel.
In these final days of Lent her poems have again called me to see a strange richness in all of life.
Fr. Showers
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