Quote of the day, 14 April: Jessica Powers

Easter to me my little sister is,
and I affirm her April’s eminence.
No beauty of atoning penances
prevails on light as does her innocence.

Our abstract night is into day transmuted
when she makes entrance into any room.
A call goes out to sunrise, April fluted.
Wakened in dew, the Easter lilies bloom.

Wide rumor says that she must dine on light
to show such health of it in her clear face.
The concept of the flowers is also right
with gleam implicit in the scent of grace.

O full of lilies in the time of lovers!
My little sister whom night did not mar
wins Easter first; its luster, one discovers,
favors the gardens where the lilies are.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, OCD (Jessica Powers)

O Full of Lilies (1956; 1984)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: The lilium longiflorum is also known as the Easter lily. The University of Wisconsin Horticulture Division of Extension explains that although the plants are forced to bloom at the appropriate time for the religious holiday, this is completely out of their normal flowering time. Today, almost all of the potted plants grown as Easter lilies are produced by less than a dozen growers located in a narrow coastal region along the border of California and Oregon. Image credit: Golden Age Photos via Adobe Stock

#Easter #JessicaPowers #lilies #poetry #SrMiriamOfTheHolySpirit

Quote of the day, 7 April: Jessica Powers

Grace guards that moment when the spirit halts
to watch the Magdalen
in the mad turbulence that was her love.
Light hallows those who think about her when
she broke through crowds to the Master’s feet
or ran on Easter morning,
her hair wind-tumbled and her cloak awry.
What to her need were the restrictions of
earth’s vain formalities?
She sought, as love so often seeks and finds,
a Radiance that died or seemed to die.

One can surmise she went to Calvary
distraught and weeping, and with loud lament
clung to the cross and beat upon its wood
till Christ’s torn veins spread a soft covering
over her hair and face and colored gown.
She took her First Communion in His Blood.

O the Tumultuous Magdalen! But those
who come upon her in the hush of love
claim the last graces. A wild parakeet
ceded its being to a mourning dove,
as Bethany had prophesied. We give
to Old Provence that solitude’s location
where her love brooded, too contemplative
to lift the brief distraction of a wing.
There she became a living consecration
to one remembering.
Magdalen, first to drink the fountained Christ
Whose crimson-signing stills our creature stir,
is the Blood’s mystic. Was it not the weight
of the warm Blood that slowed and silenced her?

Sr. Miriam of the Holy Spirit, O.C.D. (Jessica Powers)

The Blood’s Mystic (1950)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: AI-generated image (Midjourney), Mary Magdalene Runs to the Tomb at Dawn, created in an impressionist style inspired by Richard Miller (educational use).

#BloodOfChrist #JessicaPowers #mystic #StMaryMagdalene #tomb

Quote of the day, 14 February: Jessica Powers

My thoughts of you are fair as precious stones
out of the memory’s deep mysterious mines.
I cut and polish, hold the gems to light—
color of sea water, color of wines
coaxed from the earth’s sweetest fruits. I drop
them
down
into my heart, into the lifted hands
of love whose lone concern is your renown.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, o.c.d. (Jessica Powers)

The Gift of Love

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Gemstones collection jewelry set. Image credit: NPD stock / Adobe Stock (Asset ID#: 233326938)

#gift #heart #JessicaPowers #love #memory

Quote of the day, 5 February: Jessica Powers

God is the dawn, wakening earth to life;
the first morning ever,
shining with infinite innocence; a revelation
older than all beginning, younger than youth.
God is the noon, blinding the eye of the mind
with the blaze of truth.
God is the sunset, casting over creation
a color of glory
as He withdraws into mysteries of light.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, o.c.d. (Jessica Powers)

Songs Out of Silence, 3

Morneau, R F 2010, Songs Out of Silence : 99 Sayings by Jessica Powers, New City Press, Hyde Park NY.

Featured image: Dawn breaks, darkly, at Chatfield State Park in Colorado. Photo credit: Michael Levine-Clark / Flickr (Some rights reserved).

#dawn #God #JessicaPowers #poetry #SrMiriamOfTheHolySpirit

Quote of the day, 4 January: Jessica Powers

I went into the Christmas cave;
there was no Child upon the straw.
The ox and ass were all I saw.

I sought His stable where He gave
His goodness in the guise of bread.
Emptiness came to me instead.

Filled with my Father’s words, I cried,
“Where have You hid Yourself?” and all
the living answered to my call.

I found Him (and the world is wide)
dear in His warm ubiquity.
Where heart beat, there was Christ for me.

I went back to the Christmas cave,
glad with the gain of everywhere.
And lo! the blessed Child was there.

Then at His feasting board He gave
embrace. He multiplied His good
and fed in me the multitude.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, o.c.d. (Jessica Powers)

The Hidden Christ (1963)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: A donkey, sheep, and cow surround a trough of hay inside a barn. Image credit: Future Vision (AI generated) / Adobe Stock, Asset ID#: 1766663015.

#Christmas #InfantJesus #JessicaPowers #poetry #SrMiriamOfTheHolySpirit

Quote of the day, 1 January: Jessica Powers

There was nothing in the Virgin’s soul
that belonged to the Virgin—
no word, no thought, no image, no intent.
She was a pure, transparent pool reflecting
God, only God.
She held His burnished day; she held His night
of planet-glow or shade inscrutable.
God was her sky and she who mirrored Him
became His firmament.

When I so much as turn my thoughts toward her
my spirit is enisled in her repose.
And when I gaze into her selfless depths
an anguish in me grows
to hold such blueness and to hold such fire.
I pray to hollow out my earth and be
filled with these waters of transparency.
I think that one could die of this desire,
seeing oneself dry earth or stubborn sod.
Oh, to become a pure pool like the Virgin,
water that lost the semblances of water
and was a sky like God.

Sr. Miriam of the Holy Spirit, ocd (Jessica Powers)

The Pool of God (1950; 1984)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: French photographer Yoann Boyer captures this image of infinity from La Réunion. Image credit: Yoann Boyer / Unsplash (Stock photo)

#BlessedVirginMary #God #JessicaPowers #poetry #water

Quote of the day, 9 December: Jessica Powers

Here is a small bird cast as John the Baptist
who from my treetops is inspired to say:
I come from heaven to prepare the way.
Now in the east approach the feet of day.

Day will reward you well, my little bird,
who make his coming such enchanting news,
who with the sweetest music I have heard
unloose the golden latchet of his shoes.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, O.C.D. (Jessica Powers)

Bird at Daybreak (1938)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Photo by Aaron J Hill on Pexels.com (Stock photo)

#bird #JessicaPowers #poetry #prepare #StJohnTheBaptist

Quote of the day, 1 December: Jessica Powers

Come is the love song of our race and Come
our basic word of individual wooing.
It lifts audacious arms of lowliness
to majesty’s most amiable undoing,
to Godhood fleshed and cradled and made least.
It whispers through closed doors a hurry, hurry
to Tierce and fiery feast.
The liturgy of Advent plucks its bud
from the green shrub of love’s compendium:
O Wisdom, Adonai, Root of Jesse
and sign by which the mouths of kings are dumb,
O Key, O Orient, King and Cornerstone,
O our Emmanuel, come.
And Paschaltide prepares an upper room
where burns the fuller bloom.
Come is the small sweet-smelling crib we carve
from fir and bear across December frost.
It is the shaft of the flame-hungry Church
in Paschal spring, or the heart’s javelin tossed
privately at the clouds to pierce them through
and drown one in the flood of some amazing
personal Pentecost.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, O.C.D. (Jessica Powers)

Come Is The Love Song (1952; 1984)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Stock photo. Image credit: Discalced Carmelites (by permission)

#Advent #Christmas #JessicaPowers #OAntiphons #poetry

Quote of the day, 28 October: Jessica Powers

The saints and mystics
had a name
for that deep
inwardness of flame,
the height or depth
or ground or goal
Which is God’s dwelling
in the soul.

Not capax Dei
do you say;
nor yet
scintilla animae
nor synderesis—
all are fair—
but heaven,
because God is there.

All day and when
you wake at night
think of that place
of living light,
yours and within you
and aglow
where only God
and you can go.

None can assail you
in that place
save your own evil,
routing grace.
Not even angels
see or hear,
nor the dark spirits
prowling near.

But there are days
when watching eyes
could guess that you
hold Paradise.
Sometimes the shining
overflows
and everyone
around you knows.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, OCD (Jessica Powers)

For a Child of God (1953)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Jude Beck / Unsplash (Stock photo)

#ChildOfGod #indwelling #interiorLife #JessicaPowers #poetry

Quote of the day, 8 September: Jessica Powers

The Virgin Mary cannot enter into
my soul for an indwelling. God alone
has sealed this land as secretly His own;
but being mother and implored, she comes
to stand along my eastern sky and be
a drift of sunrise over God and me.

God is a light and genitor of light.
Yet for our weakness and our punishment
He hides Himself in midnights that prevent
all save the least awarenesses of Him.
We strain with dimmed eyes inward and perceive
no stir of what we clamored to believe.
Yet I say: God (if one may jest with God),
Your hiding has not reckoned with Our Lady
who holds my east horizon and whose glow
lights up my inner landscape, high and low.
All my soul’s acres shine and shine with her!
You are discovered, God; awake, rise
out of the dark of Your Divine surprise!
Your own reflection has revealed Your place,
for she is utter light by Your own grace.
And in her light I find You hid within me,
and in her morning I can see Your Face.

Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, OCD (Jessica Powers)

And in Her Morning (1945; 1946)

Powers, J 1999, The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, Siegfried, R & Morneau, RF (eds.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Rose Window depicting ‘Eight Titles of Mary’ by Margaret Edith Aldrich Rope at St Mary’s, Bourne Street, Chelsea (1952). Image credit: Amanda Slater / Flickr (Some rights reserved)

#BlessedVirginMary #FaceOfGod #God #JessicaPowers #poetry