This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Jeffrey Essmann, an ekphrastic based on Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus.
Before the light the dusty road subsumed
I was a man of sure and rabid zeal.
No living man could possibly unsteel
The righteous purpose in me that had bloomed.
The light, however, did me quite unseat:
It broke upon us in our frenzied course,
Dumbfounded me and terrified my horse
(A cloud above me now of heaving heat…).
I hear a voice toward which I blindly reach
And ask it who he possibly could be.
The answer that He gives I can’t attach
To common sense, it draws me to the breach
Of my belief, and blind I only see
The Living Man no living man can match.
Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Society of Classical Poets, The Chained Muse, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He was the 2nd Place winner in the Catholic Literary Arts 2022 Assumption of Mary poetry contest and 1st Place winner in its Advent: Mary Mother of Hope contest later that year. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room.