Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Toronto's Poet Laureate

I came upon an article in a magazine while sitting in class....I know, I know, I should've been listening to the lecture instead of reading a magazine, but I digress....the article was about the new Poet Laureate for the city of Toronto; Fr. Giorgio Di Cicco....the funny thing was, the poem quoted in the article was about the priest's take from the other side of the confessional grill....funny because I had just gone to confession last week, and because I never really thought about what goes through the mind of the priest:

In the Confessional

do you want to know?
dark, how dark it is?
it is the lightest place I know. There is no light,
no darkness;
a lot of mumbling, foreign accents, weeping;
you hear the heart; the words drone, halt, put on hats,
it is the heart you want.
it is always the same human heart.
that is why personality bores me. it is the same heart
over and over, it is not sexy or stupid or bright.
it is the same song. love me, love me, tell
me i am loved. it is the same sin over and over.
and it goes like this; i am the worst sinner in the world,
what I am can never be forgiven. it is worn like skin,
to be raked off again and again with a hand in the dark
making the sign of the cross. it is my hand, raised wearily,
tired of the human creature worthless to itself.
i know God is not tired. i am just there,
i do not know what goes on between them, the grace that
shoots through me, what He does with them before and after.
i am just there to hear the heart, and say words that make
it beat. it is the same heart in the dark that is not
dark, i make a field for us to run in. i listen and take them
out of their skin, these bodies,
i take the skin from around the heart, the skin so tight around them,
i see nothing, i know nothing but the same old heart,
the young in it; and i grow old, child afer child and the
shucked bodies taken down the river like pelts,
with the sound of children behind me,
the nakedness of God and the deserving.
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Living in Paradise: New and Selected Poems
"Part of why I became a priest was to help people finish the poem of their lives and to help write it with them or they write mine"

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