Poems

Chapter 105: SAINT OUEN

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About This Book

A varied collection of lyric and narrative verse that moves between short songs, sonnets, rondels, and longer meditative pieces. Many poems use pastoral and seasonal imagery to celebrate fields, harvest, and the sensory life of the natural world while also acknowledging the hardships and dignity of rural labor. Recurring themes include love, absence, memory, and spiritual longing, treated with formal variety and musical language. The tone alternates between celebratory, elegiac, and reflective, blending vivid description with moral and emotional observation.

SAINT OUEN

Oh shrive my soul, Belovèd! Yesterday

I placed two candles, straight and slim and fair

Before a virgin’s altar, kneeling there

For our united lives and love to pray.

Around me the cathedral’s stillness lay;

The mystery of God was everywhere;

Lifting the misty aisles through incensed air

Uprose the threading pillars, dim and grey.

God heard my prayer: and He forgave my need,

If after that day’s grace and majesty

I fall and pay my sin with bitter cost;—

You who have taught me prayer again, and creed,

Bend down in dear forgiveness unto me!

Shrive me, Belovèd! or my soul is lost.