I already shared this poem once back in May, but I’m resharing it oday since it is the Feast of the Transfiguration and later today, I am returning to Mt. Savior as I consider becoming an oblate there. I wrote it in July of 1995 when I spent six weeks living with the monks at Mount Savior Monastery near Pine City, N.Y. near Corning.
Transfiguration
The clouds of unknowing roll over me,
nuclear in their design,
probably like those that carried him,
his spirit out to the Pacific and beyond
the vapor trail I view on the horizon
now. An airliner lifts off, brushes
the cross on the steeple,
the silence into sonic resonances.
Like the SAC bomber that buzzed
across his hermitage’s roof
(its bay doors, the jaws of Apocalypse,
if opened could swallow the countryside).
The same type of bomber that took him
stateside. On Sunday after Mass,
I listen to the blues in the common room,
ponder the irony of lyrics, saints’ fates.
