Alessandro’s Ascent

              (Being a Miracle of St. Maria Goretti)

Into the brazen ferment of the times,                                           

Like a clear sky over a glistening sea,        

As enlivening as a fresh, earth-bedecked wind

That twists through the spaces between leaves and then collides

With the relentless bumblebee.

She dreamt

The dreams a little girl is apt to dream:

Of laughing babies bouncing on her knee,

Of long, brown rippling hair untrained by braids,                            

And legs like two strong stalks with lively stride

To tramp across the field or jump the brook.

She danced                        

From task to task with graceful ease,

Happily oblivious; content to be Maria,

To stay encased between these four chipped walls,

To hear the front door creak with push and pull,

To rub at stubborn spots upon the floor.

She prayed,

This pious girl, this dutiful, beautiful child,

With ready smile and peachy-coloured cheeks

Whose eyes, like two big drops of morning dew,

Would stare, transfixed, upon the crucifix

While slender fingers crisscrossed in her lap.                 

Who can understand the mystery of that day,

A day which dawned unpromising of drama?

A veiled sun…pulsating…in a hazy sky,

The stagnant air suspended in a mist

Across the parched field and the men who strove

With the stubborn soil as Adam had done before.

She sat upon the step, there shelling peas—

A meditative chore—and at the door,

Lingering, one eye on the shoe he proposed to shine,

Alessandro feasted on the blossoming figure of the girl,

Reducing her to thighs, breasts, slender limbs—and nothing more.

In one decisive, passionate leap of arms and legs,

The intersection of the two defied all but severance.

And then in circular terror he pursued

As will the frenzied horseman on the hunt,

Whose prey will dodge  and scramble for the hedge.

Seeing the great impossibility of their case,

Hearing her cry: “I will not_ It’s a sin_”

His lonely, long and love-starved years of life

Reared and he choked and spat out venom serpentine

As once was spewed in the distant garden of the world.

They found her bruised and beaten, stabbed straight through,

Punctured like lace curtains hung to let in light;

And as she bled into the sodden floor

You might have thought of Abel’s blood which spilled

And grew a voice to call upon the Lord.

The day gave up the sun, the moon appeared

And found Maria pale-cheeked upon a bed;

Her mother ground her heart out as she heard

Her daughter whisper crucifixion words

Of unfathomable forgiveness for the boy.

He wept,

Alessandro, in a lightless cubby hole of bars,

Where things with eight legs scuttled across the floor

There, where he rolled upon the floor, with filth,

As if to do so, he wished he might become

One with the dust and grime.

He wept,

Not for grief of what he’d done—at first—

But for that twisting, gnawing, dulling thing called fear;

And for that twisting, gnawing, dulling feeling of despair,

That moves about the recesses of a sinner’s heart:

An inner embrace, though barren: a soul-scorching fire.

And every night, he closed his eyes in fitful sleep

And then she’d come to him in countless dreams

Skipping, smiling, dancing and calling out his name

And just before he’d waken with a start

She’d slide her tiny hand into his own.

One night she came with lilies in her hand

Fourteen lilies to cover fourteen wounds

She gave them over to him one by one

And each became a purifying flame

Designed to draw repentance from his heart.                

Five years, ten years passed, twenty and more

Before the guard drew back the prison door

And Alessandro stumbled out a man

With wasted frame and stripe-marked hands to show

The grip of life upon the prison bars.

And like a net that sailors tug upon

To draw the fish in for an evening catch,

So Alessandro felt himself being drawn

Back to the place that once had been his home.

And there upon the step a woman sat

Shelling peas—a meditative chore.

He came upon her unexpectedly

And splaying in the dust before her feet

He begged her sweet forgiveness for his crime

And found himself entrapped between her arms

And heard her say: “If she could, then must I.”       

Who can understand the mystery of that day,

A day which dawned unpromising of drama?

A veiled sun…pulsating…in a hazy sky,

The stagnant air suspended in a mist

Across the parched pilgrims in an age-old square,

And the Father who stood there as Peter had done before.

Her mother knelt there, doubled, upon the floor,

Weeping into cloth embroidered by a child,

Joy sparkling like crystals exposed to a shaft of light,

Like that last flippant tirade of the sun before it dips,

Like a bird shows joy when it tumbles upwards on a trill,

To play upon the tallest oaken tree.

And nearby, standing tall with hat in hand,

A white-haired man approached the central dias

And saw the Pope and heard the words pronounced

Of sanctification he knew about first-hand.

Then, at “Oremus,” he too knelt down, and prayed:

“Dear Saint Maria Goretti, child-martyr

What miracles are still achieved through thee_

What wondrous things God condescends to do,

When uttered through the virgin lips of you.

How often we have need still of your care,

Trapped behind these self-made prison bars.

Sister, pray for us”—so, too, we cry.

(Summer 2006)