This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is an ekphrastic by Philip C. Kolin on a photograph of St. Thérèse of Lisieux taken in 1889 by Father Louis-Eugene Gombault.
At sixteen, a novice,
and with the pope’s blessing.
Her face lovingly surrounded
by a puffy white veil.
All wrapped up in clouds,
unfolding petals.
Her father’s little
white flower,
a French peony,
a jubilation gardenia.
Framed in a vow black habit,
God’s vessel, his vase.
She offers Père Gombault’s camera,
a second-class relic,
a soft smile for Christ
whose face she will later
join to her own name.
Now elated, she has escaped
into his captivity
in the battle for souls
doing small things
with busy stillness
cleaning floors, caring
for older sisters, tending statues
until she is called to eternity
through Carmel’s grille.
Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams as well as fifteen collections of poetry, among them Benedict’s Daughter: Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2017), Wholly God’s: Poems (Wind and Water Press, 2021), and Mapping Trauma: Poems about Black History (Third World Press, 2023).