This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by G. K. Chesterton.
The Donkey
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic, perhaps most famous to popular audiences for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown, He wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly newspaper columns), and several plays. Among his apologetic works are Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, the latter of which contributed to C. S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. A self-proclaimed orthodox Christian, he came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, to which he converted from Anglicanism in 1922.
