This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Stephanie Weller Hanson.
You are my ground
You are my ground, my deep soil,
wherein my green stem unfurls.
You are my April rain,
coaxing me to bud and blossom.
This am I, in you.
And withering, what shall I be?
Will I be that desiccated leaf,
the seed head snapped
in harsh November storms?
In the diaspora of leaf to mold
and mold to elemental earth,
will I yet live?
Once, my Lord (I then believed),
you cruelly uprooted me.
But after thirst, after wilting,
after seeming death, I found
I was transplanted
into richer ground.
So I dare to hope, amid
the midnight winter’s cold,
above the grave of all
that’s green, that you
will hold my atoms dear.
And though I disperse to dust,
like peat compressed
to glinting coal, and carbon
into diamonds made,
even dust can resurrect,
and dry bones leap
to life again.
Stephanie Weller Hanson grew up in Ohio and graduated from the University of Iowa. She has lived in Georgia, British Columbia, Great Britain and Colorado and now lives in Falcon Heights, Minnesota with her husband. They have two sons. She has had over thirty poems, stories and essays published in, among others, the South Dakota Review, Atlantic Review, First Things, Catholic Digest, Contemplative Review, The Star Tribune (newspaper), Hazmat Review and Main Channel Voices. She won the Loft-McKnight Poetry Award and was published in its volume, The Kiss of Pages Turning. A volume of her short stories, Holy Terrors and Gentle Souls, was published by St. Mary’s Press. She holds a weekly communion service at a nursing home, sings in her church choir, and plays the hammered dulcimer.
