This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Sarah Law.
Catherine of Siena
I visited you once in your Basilica,
– stonework striations of squid ink and sunlight –
your small head, mummified and silent
testified to the great swathes of time
which have surged and withdrawn since you
drew breath; sighed your last. Now you are
still and exposed, when then you were neither,
scribing your epistles like a hidden diplomat,
all the while stripping your self-love back,
until, wafer-thin, you were gone in a stroke.
Your thumb persists in its own reliquary,
drily taking measure of this crowd
as once you pressed your fingers
to the sick, and around your skinny quill –
O Sister Siena, of slender intercessions,
pray for me.
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, was published by Paraclete Press in 2020. Her novel, Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven (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.