THE INVISIBLE NUNS, SISTER JOHN, AND THE SAINT

Upstream the village house convent in which they invisibly dwell;

near us, a stink, fetid and foul: their cesspool’s overflowed,

the ancient waste seeps down the innocent brook onto the fields.

What is it to live in the ever-closed convent, invisible in the stink?

“Eternally dark, eternally rank, gloomy, gorgeous,” says the Saint —

“Regard the gold glowing limestone, tile roofs, iris-topped walls.”

Ablutions, purifications, gentle scrubbings under the habit.

Yet, “Full of wailing, complaining, and sharp, fierce crying,”

the Saint avers would be their psyches untempered by confinement.

And the radical nun Sister John we knew once? Is she there?

Who in the long-ago days of the pre-conservative popes lived in the slums,

riding the subway in sweater and jeans to minister to the poor?

Has Sister John, too, been compelled behind gold glowing walls?

Do she and her sisters still hear in their cells the subway’s despair?

“Despair, despair,” cry the sharp steel wheels, “Woe, woe,” cry the nuns,

while “Renounce,” the Saint commands, “the dismal, grim world,”

though Sister John surely would bless the flow of shit and debris,

and curse the crimes perpetrated against the helpless and needy as vile.

“Venomous, poisonous, endlessly hateful,” the Saint howls again,

with his voice, his breath, his strength, his poison, his wrath,

as he sails in his wave-beaten, wave-bitten barque in search

of the Isle of True Faith, where none dwell, as well knows Sister John,

not the “everlastingly chaste,” nor the “silken and silver garbed rich.”

“Only,” she’d cry and accuse, “the dark, dire divine of the slum.”