Two Poems for Lent

We are dust, but it’s beautiful dust

Lent is one of my favorite times to be Catholic. It’s an invitation (or a plea) to pour yourself out completely, so that you are ready to be filled up. A time to really examine who we are and why we’re here and now. Here are two poems about that.

Crocuses

Record snowfall, the radio host says, this winter –
And I believe it, my feet have been cold
Since about the middle of November –
These records, of course, will be broken again,
A cause more for dread than anything else.
Still, someone forgot to tell the crocuses
Hidden under the crabgrass by the driveway
Dutifully rearing their buttery heads 
At the first warm splash of sunlight.
I almost trample them when I return from Mass
But I don’t.
Perhaps because Lent has just begun, and I know
That I too am like crabgrass and dirty snow covering flowers,
I look down.
And my feet aren’t cold, the snow is gone, 
Because now, at last, the crocuses are blooming.

A Late Magnificat

To be dust, flaking from the earth’s crust
Made up of the grains of ages long past
Magma once, perhaps, or dried up seawater,
Or just the great-great-granddaughter of an ancient trash heap
Is still to be born from the same earth that became
– somehow, in an instant –
The body of a divine God-man in a virgin’s womb
Herself dust, but her arms stretched open wide
Her lungs clear and proclaiming “Let it be done,
Magnify, overshadow, rejoice.”
Perhaps the rocks and oceans yearned to say the same –
I feel them straining out from my bones.
I must learn to speak for them, to give voice 
To the hunger of the dead and dying earth.
So, Lord, strip it all to dust –
Let it be done, as if I am gone from it all
Magnify, overshadow, may the earth rejoice.