From an ongoing project in which I reflect on what St Thérèse of Lisieux may have written to her spiritual director, Père Almire Pichon. All the letters she sent to him in actuality have been destroyed.
4
The tunnel through the mountain,
its black rush, crash of sound –
o my father, is this head-on death?
I have hankered after martyrdom,
the drama of severance, and yet
the sheer void, the long-drawn
clamour of hollowed-out rock –
a nothingness I had not intimated,
nor had I prepared for the shock
of hurtling back into the light.
25
I have retrieved, Mon Père, the grace
of clumsiness. Just now I dropped
my copybook: its cracked spine
fractured all my limping words;
earlier I knocked the bread
from basket to refectory floor;
for penance, I wear broken crusts
around my neck. I think of them
as sacramental; rough-cut hosts –
and I their battered chalice.
32.
With all my clumsy sentences and songs
I hope to make you smile, Mon Père,
the way a child delights her mother’s heart,
or a poor girl, given fine sandwiches
dreams against the tree, while Papa casts
for the bon mot, a flash of fish –
it seems I have one bouquet I can share,
the holy moment of the lips and eyes
as though I tender in my catch of time
a little sliver of eternity.
© 2019, Sarah Law
SARAH LAW lives in London and is a tutor for the Open University and elsewhere. Widely published as a poet, she edits the online journal Amethyst Review, for new writing engaging with the sacred.
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