Poems by Fr. Edward O.P. Iceland

Seagull on Sistine Chapel chimney
flies to fame as
Papal Conclave goes on

P.S----- Forwarded Message -----

From: edward .....
To: Donald .
Sent: Friday, 22 March 2013, 14:01
Subject: Re: Fw: Some 'soul-quakes' on Pope Franciscus

Dear Father Donald,

Thank you for two letters. You were generous to publish so much of me, but you have permission to use whatever comes from me, or not to use it.

Two later poems are attached. One for the 25th Anniversary of Our Sisters, the other about Pope Francis's inauguration sermon, which was excellent.

Blessings in Domino,

fr Edward O.P.

                                                                  

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: edward booth ...
To: Donald Nunraw ...
Sent: Saturday, 16 March 2013, 22:45
Subject: Some lines on Pope Franciscus

Dear Father Donald,

I must say that my first reactions to the election of Pope Franciscus
were of non-comprehension.
But I persevered and I see in him the taking on of the Papal charism,
as I had seen it in Pope Benedict.
I quote a poem I wrote in 2009*[Earthquakes], which I think as a poem was much
better and came from a period when my poems were greater adventures
(each of them) than the more recent ones.
The Scottish Jesuit quoted was Father James Quinn, who did a lot of
translating work. He was the spiritual at the Beda when I was teaching
there. I remember other parts of his patter: "Never say that there is
light at the end of the tunnel: it might be an approaching train!"

I thought I had sent this, but just found it unsent (1045 p.m.
Saturday). I have changed the name of the priest to the correct one,
something I had asked Heather  to pass on to you verbally)


Blessings in Domino,

fr Edward O.P.

-- 
Father Edward Booth O.P.
Stykkishólmur,
Iceland.

                                                                                                                                                          

Newly elected Pope Francis (C) bows his head in prayer as he appears on the central balcony of St Peter's Basilica on March 13, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican. Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the 266th Pontiff.

Poem. Fr. Edward OP

Consapevolezza nell'Ultimo Luogo – P.R. fina P.F.

My computer's memory is more finely tuned than my own.

I had watched with intensity the soul-changes evidenced in his face

which took place in Papa Ratzinger from his acceptance to his inauguration.

I saw the emergence of a charismatic other:

a boy-soul and with it a boy-face of youth and innocence:

the Lord in taking possession was re-arranging cathartically, utterly,

the long laid foundations and structures to make him other -

ultra vires proprias -

to lead, to model his humanity and so to model others.

I watched, intrigued, to see his reactions to the Cardinals

passing into the sunlit Piazza:

a delicate salute when he was saluted,

all Christ-like positivity of the highest elevation.

And now, the body and mind spent in high service

 Reposing in the Alban Hills at Castel Gondolfo. 

he's reposing in the Alban Hills at Castel Gondolfo.          

Vergelt's Gott's a wish which in such a matter rises to transcendence.

And now again, the self-same charism's deeply lodged

zygotically in the soul-womb of another.

Puzzling initially in his different great-soulness,

with billions of others I watched him,

this Italian transplanted body and soul.

Born and raised in Argentina.

The crowd erupted, the youth especially,

drizzle-washed, time mattered not.

Billowing black smoke, until the fifth essor

brought billowing white.

The observant seagull disappeared -

if he returns to a possible nest-site at the peak,

he'll find it dismantled!

But himself in white soutane and white souquetta,

without stole until the blessing and without red, fur-trimmed capa:

“Brothers and Sisters, bona sera … !”

Soft-spoken! (I asked myself “Where is the fire?”)

We prayed for him. He blessed us and the entire world,

spoken not sung in the ancient form.

The pixel-content to display the fullness of his idealism and his past

was not large enough in that short burst to say a fraction

of what's disposable. 

I thought of what lay in wait:

the well-known problems, the overall normalising

where alone it counts.

I felt protective: could that kind but seeming forceless voice

give spirit blows for each injury received?

With a chronology but not coherent;

videos seen not rightly ordered, I felt a stranger watching distantly.

Some views of him – no spectacles -  seemed not of a younger

but of another man.

Quite out of order I watched the Sistine Mass:

the homily in such an unusual style: “... camino insieme … !”

Pope Francis at Our Lady as “Salus Populi Romani”
in Saint Mary Major's

Then I saw what came in between,  

that early promised, though undefined, visit to Our Lady:

just after 8 o'clock:  

driven in a service car to a side entrance,

with flowers presented to Our Lady as

“Salus Populi Romani” in Saint Mary Major's.

I saw the emerging intensity given

in greeting to the early Mass attenders,

the Community of Dominican Confessors,

of whom an earlier Prior once sought my co-presence.

The force, the movements highly sensitized,

not from a boy-face yet younger:

truer and truest;

the transition from that first heavy face complete it seemed.

But that later Sistine Mass found him in full transit,

a charisma-Pasch, but not complete.

I watched his Mass with minor idiosyncratic deviations from the rubrical norms.

Memories arose of a Scottish Jesuit, now dead,

with a well-rehearsed patter of wide origins,

self-deprecating over Jesuit liturgical inaccuracies:

summed up as “Like a Jesuit in Holy Week”.

With the guidance of Monsignor Marini that will be covered, reorganised.

But how to describe the transformation?

I found amongst my sermons and writings, including Recollections,

innumerable references to earthquakes,

such as I heard and felt in the protracted rumblings and shakings,

and from the impatient honkings of innumerable cars

descending from the Alban Hills – perhaps as Ambrogio suggested:

“a pseudo-panic with the hope

of getting the area designated a 'disaster zone', producing tax reductions,

even subsidies.”

I found some lines in an old poem of mine:

Earthquakes within dated 30^th April 2009.

I started from those from without,

then continued with lines not exactly appropriate to Ultimus Locus

but offering a mental scale:

2 days on at Sistine Chapel to the Cardinals
“The soul also has presages,
anticipations of what  
might or must come.
Crash-threats
with multiple fractures,
attritions, scree-falls.
A Scottish Jesuit's patter, "Never say that there is

light at the end of the tunnel: it might be an approaching train!"

“The soul also has presages,
anticipations of what
might or must come.
Crash-threats
with multiple fractures,
attritions, scree-falls.

May the angels keep us
in their still minds.
May the saints show their presence.
Against soul-quakes
there‘s the measure of order,
which reveals its jagging
by breadth and in depth.
Catharsis is multiple.
Such moments show what‘s

deepest in us
and how various
what the skin cannot resist.”

The scale is there, though I'm not prophet enough to know what benefits

this normalising of the highest event may bring down

from above and from around,

with elements from the old and recent past

and all the lessons from the discovery and from the recent politics

of the Argentine Republic.

But in the highest beneficial sense

it provides the hopefullest bracket of the

Christian and Catholic experience:

“sweet are the uses of adversity”.

And the finalising words on physical earthquakes made clear

an interpretation not literal, even counter-literal

of beneficent catharsis:

“Then the tension breaks
and danger lunges and stalks
so quickly.
Seconds long man‘s his plaything.
The dust rises;
the rubble rattles and grows.
After time it settles,
damped down by the rain.”

Rain dampening,

an ancientest image of

the work amongst us of the highest Wisdom,

for where the strains are replaced

by the penetrative fall of gentle rain: pacifying the spirit

and the promise of the harvesting of both

Eucharistic and non-eucharistic fine wines,

 Fr. Edward OP

Stykkishólmur 15 March 2013

Monte_Cavo_e_lago_Albano 

* Earthquakes 2009

 Earthquakes within

Between the physical and the spiritual
who can doubt the echoes and the likenesses?
Those landquakes I have known
in the Alban Hills  
were extending shudders
absorbed and transmitted
by hot liquid rock
almost on fire below.
No danger
though they caused some panic.
They left cracks in walls, floors, ceilings,
whilst doors lost their fit.
In the calcareous mountains
the unbending rock‘s pressured.
The earth‘s electricity is disturbed
troubling invisibly and deeply the air,
thence spreading unease
filled out in a silence between opposite poles;
picked up by birds, by animals,
most by men.[i]
Scaring with inarticulate fears, drying mouths,
unloosing long dormant passions,
troubling all inner sense.
Then the tension breaks
and danger lunges and stalks
so quickly.
Seconds long man‘s his plaything.
The dust rises;
the rubble rattles and grows.
After time it settles,
damped down by the rain.
 
The soul also has presages,
anticipations of what
might or must come.
Crash-threats
with multiple fractures,
attritions, scree-falls.

May the angels keep us 
in their still minds.
May the saints show their presence.
Against soul-quakes
there‘s the measure of order,
which reveals its jagging
by breadth and in depth.
Catharsis is multiple.
Such moments show what‘s

deepest in us
and how various
what the skin cannot resist.

Fr. Edward OP

Stykkishólmur

30 April 2009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alban_Hills

---

i.  These two lines were written from memories which were long, now untraceable. I decided I must investigate it. I found that many Japanese have worked on phenomena associated with earthquake prediction.. Japanese seismography seems to have been helped much in the nineteenth century by Scottish physicists including the pioneering Cargil Gilston Knott. There is a book by a Japanese writer on the reactions of animals (drawing on extensive folklore research) which include birds, touches on plants, and has some human reactions: Motoji Ikeya, Earthquakes and animals, from Folk Legends to Science  (Singapore 2004). Generous portions of this are to be found in Google Books. He comments on the scepticism of western thinkers and Japanese who take over their ethos.