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Poetry Pilgrimage No traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. – Isaiah I On our tour of Teresa’s foundations some convents were shuttered and locked. We rang portal bells and shouted but not even pigeons were roused. We idled in unshaded streets stared at chalky walls, took hot strolls or sat back on our heels while our guide phoned someone who didn’t answer and the driver slipped off for a drink. An occasional dog snarled for snacks, cats bedded under our bus. No one else appeared on the pavement: the silence was penitential. Did Teresa’s nuns take siestas? We couldn’t remember her regimen, but rest in the Lord, why not? Why were we clamoring at the gate? It was clear we’d come 4000 miles to learn to wait. II The English couple at Taizé asked for addresses of U.S. retreats offering travel stipends for foreign seekers. Christianity & Literature 2015, Vol. 65(1) 104–107 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0148333115611619 cal.sagepub.com They’d done Lourdes, Fatima, Loreto, Santarem, Medjugorje sampled El Camino by bus. Croagh Patrick was too steep, the inn at St. Winefride’s Well too dear, but surely there were low-cost cures to be had in my country? I thought of the healing mud of Chimayo, of the pilgrims, some hiking a hundred miles along freeways, up dusty desert roads in the sun, walking every day of Holy Week shouldering crosses, carrying flowers to the shrine to ask for God’s mercy, freely given. III A striped cat ran up the 100 steps of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, past the veiled women mounting the stairs on their knees, past the climbers chanting their beads, past the verger who opened the large oaken door for a man in a wheelchair, women on crutches, past the font, the windows, the pews, headed straight up the nave toward the altar, then disappeared. Some say the devil caught it by the tail, some think it’s catching mice in the cellar, I say it’s curled up on that stature of Mary, warming her lap for the Child. IV In a small bay on Loon Lake there’s a tree with a hole in the trunk the shape of an owl. Each time I canoed to the bay Poetry 105 after the long push up the shore, I’d lie back and slowly float over half-sunken logs through lily pads straight to the tree and its empty hole. One afternoon I heard hooting there, but it was just a fooling wind. Our last summer at the lake I paddled to all my best places. The bank of wild blueberries, the watery field of pickerelweed where bears fished and dragonflies rode my oars, the steep cliffs where eagles taught their young to fly, and last of all, the tree. I entered the bay in a soft rain, paddled quickly to the far shore, and there in the hole in the tree– no owl, but a nest. And nearby, a rustle, a flash of wing, something waiting for me to leave, waiting for what would be born. ß Diane Vreuls Author biography Diane Vreuls has published a novel, a book of poems, a collection of short stories, and a children’s book, as well as work in such magazines as Commonweal, the Paris Review, and The New Yorker. After Eden, a new collection of poems, was published by Pinyon Press in the fall of 2015. Papyrus Fragments They move, these bitten isles, between voids time has scribed. Here lie two tales at once. One in shards, like wings between two panes, lessons love. This frail colony of words 106 Christianity & Literature 65(1) ...

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