2 Healing Ministry

Volume 16, Number 1, Winter 2009

P oetry page

5JH=J=

Our days are made of the first stirrings – bend into

varied ages and them and suppose or
altering composition. hunch.
Layers of change through
out time and space. It is the gut that notices
this larger terrain—this immense
To feel the changes sliding. It is the gut that
that have been made feels its way through changing
does not require landscape.
the minds’ knowing alone—of where
one thing ends and The eye may not see, the mind,
another begins. it may not know, the heart may
not feel, but the gut senses.
Nor is the The gut holds on
heart’s feeling enough. to shudders and rumbles. The
We need a gut that senses change. gut explores valleys and
hills, the faults and
An intuition that plates of the
senses the shifting topology of our lives.
plates and layers
of life. We need a The gut knows nothing
heart and a mind that will trust of fur and feathers,
the gut. of brocade and silk.
It holds no hope in the fine
In us, and the soft: amid
down deep and beneath the smooth and refined.
are movements we cannot see,
upheavals we will never see, The heart and the mind, they
shifts we cannot know will come. loll themselves to sleep
in the finery. Casting their
We can sense them. eyes on the silt and lace
We can lean forward at of low grade terrain;
 Healing Ministry 3
Volume 16, Number 1, Winter 2009

feeling for a faint sorrow and the joy

interior pulse that they that arrives from change
cannot know. ushered in on the current
of the hummingbird’s wing
Our days shift and move at noon day.
without regard for the mind’s
vigilant hope for reason, and Layers of life
the heart’s need for rhythm that we cannot see.
and rhyme. Things
move about without warning. We are piles of layers
I cannot hope to see within the twist of time
that plate raised up above the others and the stretch of space;
or that one dropped down below. the spray of the wave
The gut knows disturbance: and the stir of air.
turbulence is its language— We hold on amid
and it knows it well. our lack of ingenuity;
we dream on despite our
My gut feels them: innocence of any true power.
A jarring drop or jolting Sensing only the dark,
rise is measured for sure in feeling only the layers
the gut. The heart, the heart of our piled past,
reaches out and feels we hope against hell that our
through the layers of space heart and our mind have
and time for the shifting listened well and found
and the rolling forces what is true, what is sure—
We no longer see—the what the gut has to offer.

—Father Dn. Thomas Johnson-Medland, CSJ, OSL