| Poetry and God
THE CARMELITE NUN WALKS ME FROM THE CHAPEL
AT DIVINA PROVIDENCIA WHERE ROMERO WAS SLAIN
Every body is walking to Heaven.
Monsignor touched your heart.
Go and help him,
and he will help you.
We are all walking to Heaven.
Nice to meet you.
And we are going to Heaven.
We must start every morning.
It is necessary.
Jim Bodeen
March 20, 2006
CASA DE SOLIDARIDAD
If one turns aside from Him
to go towards the truth,
one will not go far before
falling into His arms.
—Simone Weil, Spiritual Autobiography
Sometimes the house that holds the people
is a story. Talking into the night a man forgets
himself for truth larger than the war from any side.
“I came here for the first time in 1980.
I had read about a meeting of bishops in Puebla.
They had met earlier in Medillín, in Columbia.”
He has been doing the telling for a long time,
following the story of power and God and the poor.
People called him on the phone in his hotel room.
We know you’re there. His room is never
on the street. His bed is against an inside wall.
Still, he felt safer during the war.
He tells it from his dreams, from a jeep driving to San Vicente.
Some say he is more Salvadoran than the Salvadorans.
He is not random, but after years of telling,
he has learned the damage of lies,
and lists them among bullets and earthquakes.
Simone Weil stays with him wherever he walks.
“One can never wrestle enough with God
if one does so out of pure regard for the truth.
Christ likes us to prefer truth to Him,
because before being Christ, He is truth.”
Two small notebooks in his shirt pocket
record the week’s observations.
He has found the lie but remains uncertain
of the truth that will replace it.
During the Romero march to remember
he walks out of darkness to find his friend.
They talk briefly. He turns back to the street.
The story was here for so many years.
Everything from that volcano
remains in his shirt pocket.
—for Gene Palumbo
Jim Bodeen, March 28, 2006
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