This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Fr. Robert Phelps, O.F.M. Cap.
Luke 15:20
“So he set out and came to his father. But when he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.”
The old man inhaled staccato bursts of
desperate air as he strained to see
down the darkened road the disheveled
figure approach in the fog of early morning.
The tears welling in his eyes
blurred the outlines of the approaching man’s
hesitant steps.
Please let it be my son, he
whispered to the fog…
Fr. Robert Phelps, O.F.M. Cap. has been a Capuchin friar for 63 years and a priest for almost 55. He served for 26 years in the territory of Guam in the western Pacific and 14 years in Hawaii. He began to write creatively when on a private retreat in a rain forest near Lahaina, Maui, in 1991. He has one full-length book of poems, In the Hug of a Sun that has Stopped, published by Lion Autumn Music Co.; two chapbooks, Ever, and Point of View, published by Finishing Line Press; and one e-book, Incessancy, published by Book Baby. He lives in a community of friars in Beacon, New York.
