Poem for Thursday and Fair Pigs

Saint Francis And The Sow 

By Galway Kinnell 

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths

sucking and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

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We had a lot of chores to do Thursday, the most exciting of which was getting haircuts, which at least required us to leave the apartment (something I also did at midday when the office people came around to test the fire alarms, which I dislike as much as the cats do). We only managed a short walk in the late afternoon but there were frogs and osprey and the weather was cool and lovely. 

My Thursday chat group met to talk about the debate, Jewish funerals vs. Christian funerals, fandom, and various other things, after which birthday girl Cheryl and I watched the new episode of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in which basically only Elendil is making decisions I respect, but it's not Pharazon's fault Tolkien turned him into a villain. Pigs at the Evergreen State Fair: