Making Assumptions

by Jeffrey Essmann | August 14, 2024 12:03 am

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This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Sarah Law.

Making Assumptions

The starker the better, as far
as holy portraits are concerned:

I can’t care for florid throngs,
those vapid raptures as she floats

up on a cloud, angelic putti to
each side, and not a hair disturbed.

Caught by ineffable, embodied, grace
at the moment of death – barely aged

though full of years – simplicity must have it:
charcoal smudge and dash, on sepia,

a plain bed in a sunlit room, and something
searing – splash of gold, perhaps,

to sketch her passing into mystery –
we few who saw it fallen to our knees.

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Sarah Law lives in Norwich, UK, where she is an associate lecturer for the Open University. She edits the online Amethyst Review, a journal for new writing engaging with the sacred. She is a published poet, with six full length collections and contributions in various journals and anthologies. Her collection, Therese: Poems[2], was published by Paraclete Press in 2020. Her novel, Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven[3] (Wipf and Stock, 2022) is a 2023 Illumination Book Award silver medal winner. Her essay on Julian of Norwich and the City of Norwich, ‘The Soul A City’, has been selected for inclusion in the Orison anthology of Best Spiritual Literature 2023[4].

Source URL: https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2024/08/making-assumptions/

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