Saint Beauty: a poem

Saint Beauty

In the direct way of the foolish,

St. Francis walked up to a wolf

and said Brother.

It was a generic naming

with Gubbio’s villagers murmuring

mashed potatoes

mashed potatoes

like actors creating scrim in

a Perry Mason juror’s box.

This was not the wolf who dressed

in Granny’s flannel gown and tied on

a nightcap, no, this was Brother Wolf

touching paw to palm:

I’ll be good.

What’s to learn from this story?

Feed all creatures until

claimed by God from Lost & Found?

Goodness is a gamble.

Perry proved beauty is no defense.

The mystery of being is

trumped by the mystery of not-being.

Not-flesh embodied needs flesh,

even that grandmother’s,

toasty in her long flannel gown.

________

by Sarah Sarai. @@@ From the journal, Lyre Lyre. #5, 2013. (The site is no longer live.)

Why call water my sister if water isn't my sister? PESSOA v ST. FRANCIS

Don't get carried away, St. Francis. Pessoa has some words for you.

Today someone read me St. Francis of Assisi.
I listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
How could a man who was so fond of things
Never have looked at them or understood what they were?

Why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
To feel it better?
I feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
Sister, or mother, or daughter.
Water is beautiful because it’s water.
If I call it my sister,
I can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
And that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
Or, better yet, not to call it anything
But to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
Without any names.
 

Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected PoemsPublisher: Penguin, New York, 2006, 0-14-303955-5

Photo from: Rivanna Writer Blogspot

Rossellini & the Bird Whisperer

Criterion Collection released a new edition, remastered and revived, of Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis. When I saw it at the library I grabbed it.
While the film is less magnificent than Open City or Il Messia, it is crisp, visually elegant, distinct, simple, making use of the richness in contrast and drama of black and white; an intended giving over to and joining with the impossible revolution Francis instigated. Something critics may have missed in their annoyance with the first half hour.

Even with cultural differences of era and gender, I must say, Claire and her band seem stilted, but what's new.

Included with the DVD is a chapbook of several essays about the film and an interview with Rossellini, in which he discusses how he came to make the movie. In part:

When I made Paisan a unit of the American Army gave me some help to make it. I got three German prisoners of war to play the roles of the Germans. We were in a little town in southern Italy and there was a guard for the prisoners. The guard disappeared one day and, as those Germans were prisoners of war and they were very conscious of it, they wanted to be guarded by somebody. They asked for help in a little convent of Franciscan monks. So they slept and ate there, came to work on the film and went back to the convent. That is how I discovered the convent and the Franciscans. I was very moved by their innocence. It was magnificent. A very wise old monk, Brother Raffaele, who was a servant, not a real priest, said he was a poet. I asked him what kind of poetry he was doing. He said, "I wrote a poem about a rose." I asked him to tell it to me. He closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sky and said, "Oh, Rose!" And that was the whole poem. How can you have a better poem than that? It was also a sign of tremendous humility. I became very close friends with a number of the Franciscans and I thought of making a film about St. Francis.

From "Interview with Roberto Rossellini" by Victoria Schultz. First published in Film Culture, no. 52, 1971.