FINIAN
I dreamt I saw you,
Brown robed and sandaled,
Between massive blue columns
In a Vatican courtyard
And I called out to you
And a nun said
“He can’t hear you”.
So I went over to you
And I spoke into your ear
And a memory welled in your eyes
As you mumbled
“These days I just can’t…”
And you shuffled away
Into the dark corridors
Of a whispering Rome.
So when I awoke,
I lay still,
Remembering your face
Crossed by thick glasses of the 60’s
And pillared by long sideburns of the 70’s
Bathed in the yellow light
Of the 10:30 mass
At Our Lady of Mt. Carmel
With your hair black,
Streaked back
And your thick moustache,
Smiling, trying
To look Mexican enough,
As if trying to cross over
The way only an Irishman would,
Open, open and open,
And speaking with a patience
That seemed more concerned
With possibility
Than with persuasion
As you would pause and gaze
At our faces,
And it was in those silences
That I first felt the deep beauty
Of spoken words
When they are spoken
With love to others
Without presuming them to be true.
My brother and I
Were your altar boys
And my brother and I
Teenage sang and played
Guitar harmony songs
At your mass
And you blessed my motorcycle
All the way to Mexico
And you blessed my mother’s ashes
All the way to eternity
And you were the one
Who most believed
In my going south
As if a man’s voluntary dive
Into another culture were less caused
By the pessimism for his own
And more caused by the karma calling
Of a better borderless world
Until it changes him,
Losing him
More by what he has learned and
Less by whom he has loved
So when I lost my faith,
I still kept your face
To look back upon in my dreams
The way a man does
When his days are divorced from hope.
For the word, priest,
Begins with the pursed lips
Of the word prayer
Like you, Father Finian,
A prayer of peace
Made into man
And perhaps
Holiness lies
Waiting somewhere
Between skin and light
Where all ritual slows down to
A frozen genuflection in time
Allowing, for that split second,
A small child to run freely
From out of an old man’s past
Through a wet wildflower meadow
Into the waiting arms of his mother,
Who whisks him up and twirls him
And just before kissing him,
Whispers into his little ear,
“I just know you will be so special
And that you will touch
Many many lives.”
David.
