Survival

Hailing a Cab

The Mumbler Speaks of
Pigeon Wars

Squeeze Play: For Joe and
Norma Jean

A Local Virgo Makes the Paper

Safe from the Elements

St. Valentine's Day: When you Care Enough to Send the Very Best

Completely Well: For B.B. King and Wallace Stevens

April Dancing: For Dietrich
Bonhoeffer

The Left Hand of God

Passing Thru for Ti Jean

The Rosary of Dachau

The jewelled Servant
mounted n the gold
Chair of Peter
Pius appeared

A near saint’s
ghost waxed to life
robed in virgin white
preserved inside
an air-tight case
of cathedral glass

From behind which
the infallible marbles
of his blue spectacled
eyes shot blank blessings
at the pilgrim shuffle
trafficking past the same

Embalming Papal stare
that bid the Jews lie
down in the green pastures
of having to choose death
as mass martyrs in the fires
of a branding new testament

While through the secret
channels of the Sacred heart
Christ’s late Vicar on Earth
bargined the Savior’s own kind
in excgange for the diplomatic
indulgence of Time

Leaving The Fuehrer free
in the shadow of St.peter’s
to fiddle as Rome burned
under the pain of an ashen
silence only a Mystical Body
could keep locked in its soul

Where December bells told
of Belsen’s melted bones
chiming in the burning
refrain ringing in Advent’s
Word made Flesh

“O’ Come, O’ Come Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appears...”

To be the Body and Blood
Soul and Divinity of
The real Presence
hunting in the dark
incense drifting
down from Auschwitz
to The Eternal City
seeping through the stained
glass saints who window
the Papal Chapel where

For his Pope’s Penance
Pius on his knees fingered
in every black and counted bead
the smoothly shaven and burned
heads his Faith had chained
into being the Rosary
of Dachau’s well-done dead