Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Bonnie ThurstonJuly 30, 2007
You live in unremitting darkness,
surrounded by an unbearable silence
with which your friends cannot cope.
They fill the air with worthless words,
ugly flies buzzing around your sores.
Your howl of pain, moans in the night,
attempt to shatter the stillness
of divine and distant implacability.
Your cries are sacred songs,
humanitys common lament.

With no more reasonableness
than the cause of your agony,
the eyelids of the morning blink,
give a transitory glimmer
of the wildness behind all suffering.
You glimpse One whose ways are not ours,
Who, blasted by our whys, changes the subject.
For all this unearned, unredeemable pain,
your recompense is only the Is-ness of God,
barely enough, but light to wrestle on.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

A leading figure in academic Catholic feminism after the Second Vatican Council, Anne E. Carr was also a renowned scholar and an inspiration to generations of theologians.
James T. KeaneJuly 01, 2025
At the time of his appointment as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in 2023, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost described in an interview one change he would like to see in the bishop selection process: greater involvement of lay people.
Colleen DulleJuly 01, 2025
Bishops from the conferences of Africa, Asia, and Latin America produced a joint document calling for climate justice ahead of the U.N. climate conference in November.
“One of the things I find most appealing about the award-winning writer and poet Mary Karr is her forthright, almost brutal, honesty.”
James Martin, S.J.July 01, 2025