Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
The still pilgrim ponders a paradox
“As an earthling, you are traveling in space at this very moment
at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour on the ancient pilgrimage
...
The still pilgrim considers a hard teaching
“If you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish
the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”
—Flannery O’Connor
The still pilgrim hears a diagnosis
“Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a nervous system disease that
affects the brain and spinal cord. No one knows its cause. ...
The still pilgrim revisits the British Museum for the first time in twenty years
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe.
—Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The still pilgrim invents dawn
The still pilgrim climbs the Mountain of God.
She somehow has not lost her way.
Her feet find the prints where they have trod.
The sun feels less heavy today.
...
The still pilgrim’s thoughts upon rising
Blessed sleep and the long call of light.
The morning a mercy of birds.
Returned from the black hole of being,
she finds all as she left it last night....
The still pilgrim makes dinner
It’s Mother’s Day and I have no mother.
She left and took my daughterhood.
It’s hard to lose us both, recover.
A double grief. A day to brood.
...
Spit and dirt, said the blind man
when he left Christ’s side
himself no more a blind man
since Christ gave him sight.
The hidden life
There are also many other things that Jesus did,
but if these were to be described individually,...
On Botticelli’s Annunciation
I have met them in the Uffizi
the angel hunched on bended knee—
his thigh thick beneath his satin robe—
the virgin’s urgent contrapposto
her sudden arm extended long
...
The year begins & Christ hides hushed
in the brambles and in the brush,
in the long shadows on the long street,
in the creases of the faces that I greet.
Dryad of my back yard,
Apollo of my morning,...
For shadowment: Villanelle for the solstice
Here, here in the crook of the year,
the crux and fix and flux of the year
light falls long across and dear.
What the angel said
For Fra Angelico
He spoke to you in blue, in the long call
of light from the top of a Tuscan hill....
"And the angel left her"
Luke 1:38
So there she stood alone amid a stillness
as loud as any earthquake she had heard,...
Stone work
I know the one I want when I find it.
Turning them over, like tortoises,
rubbing their ridged underbellies, their curves,...
St. Lazarus
He knit him self up, a cable-stitch of skin.
Pushed his left eye in its socket, then his right.
Cracked the knuckles in his fingers (now so thin!).
...