Poetry - in the Last Week of Ordinary Time

Christ Calming the Storm - Eugene Delacroix

From Mary Oliver...

and 

Matthew 8:23-25

  Maybe

Sweet Jesus, talking

his melancholy madness,

   stood up in the boat

      and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.

So everybody was saved

   that night.

      But you know how it is

when something

different crosses

   the threshold—the uncles

      mutter together,

the women walk away,

the young brother begins

   to sharpen his knife.

      Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes

like the wind over the water—

   sometimes, for days,

      you don’t think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,

after the multitude was fed,

   one or two of them felt

      the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight

before exhaustion,

   that wants to swallow everything,

      gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,

as they are now, forgetting

   how the wind tore at the sails

      before he rose and talked to it—

tender and luminous and demanding

as he always was—

     a thousand times more frightening

         than the killer storm.