Birthday 11/29/07- My Year of the Pig... still!

My dear friend Julie Benbow sent me this birthday greeting; it was for the love of the words, the blessing of our own beauty and a wonderful reminder that we share poetry and pigs with each other. And so I pass the gift to you... my b-day gift to all my word loving friends.



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 the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and 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 the 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.



*for an interview: http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/11/14_edgerlym_galwaykinnell/

and more: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/04/10/miller/