The life - at the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. The Schools of Siena - Poem

The Life

   Our brother who is white as a blanket
   gives us milk-white chocolate to eat
   lays his tender and hairless hand
   on my son's blond head tenderly
   as his lips make a kiss on the gift to say
   his silent blessings on us all
   who stand still for them. Cold dry
   sunlight sifts from the cloister wall.
   San Bernardino is mending broken pots
   again --a canny miracle barely
   fixed on Signorelli's fresco of humble ghosts.

   In the Chapel (two hundred years later)
   baroque and fruity muscular forms
   strain and vault into empty air and
   eternal hemispherical space. We stand there
   and I think of the poor day below
   and the narrow brick road we walked
   worn hollow by our hosts' bony feet.
   I think of raw wooden stakes nailed
   by wires to the milky horizon waiting
   for tendril vines to rise and cling.

   The early fields are veined with poppies
   in the cool air. Once there was nothing
   here. The lesson is still emptiness.

   We take our blessings with us.

Roderick Watson is Professor of English Studies and Head of the Department at the University of Stirling and is also Director of the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and he has published a book of verse, True History on the Walls. He has published extensively on modern Scottish literature and is editor of the essential anthology, The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English. Watson also has been General Editor of the Canongate Classics series since it was established in 1987.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group