Door Left Open, by StevieB

Mass in a Connemara Cabin, by Aloysius O’Kelly (Ireland) 1883

​ Door Left Open

What makes us holy?
The paper Sacred Heart, curling?
The Mass on the wooden kitchen table:
linen stiff, silver bright,
tall chalice elevated,
stiff-armed final blessing?

But maybe:
the neighbors coming in,
shawls pulled tight over old heads,
farmers with dusty wool, patched knees.

A tin basin. A tea towel. A churn
pushed out of the way.

Today’s a Feast Day:
pot brimming with mutton stew,
liquor, tea, and fruitcake, 
a jig, like a flame
leaping from the hearth. 

Holiness, perhaps:
not from blessing,
but the door left open.

Later, Land War.
Later, American wakes.
 
Today: hurling on the green,
tug-of-war. A few lovers in the hay,
mouths spitting straw 
and promises.

StevieB.
 
Stephen (“StevieB.”) McDonnell has spent his life in mystical—and later, erotic—adventures, wandering the wilds of the soul and serving as a wounded healer: part priest, part activist, part therapist, part trickster. In his sixties, he began shaping the prose of that journey into lyric poetry. He’s been learning the craft from Rumi and Whitman, O’Hara and Ginsberg—and the great, mysterious in-between. He lives in an anchor-hold with windows in every room, watching the wide-open sky above the farmlands of eastern Long Island, New York.