St. Francis Speaks

by Jeffrey Essmann | October 4, 2023 1:00 am

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This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Fr. Robert Phelps, O.F.M. Cap.

St. Francis Speaks

“Signore, it’s no less for me to
Grace plaster-cast backyard birdbaths than,
Unfettered, to fly in the sky like a hawk.

Freed by my Lady Poverty, I saw the
Creator’s possibilities all round me.
My sisters, the birds, they understood,
Not in their song, but in their flight, that

We’re called all to an aerial brotherhood.”

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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.

Source URL: https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2023/10/st-francis-speaks/

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