This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is an ekphrastic poem by Jeanna Cooper based on Giovanni Di Paolo’s Catherine of Siena Invested with the Dominican Habit.
Image credit: Giovanni di Paolo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember which he had taken with tongs from the altar.” Isaiah 6:6.
Haloed against azure wings and golden shafts of light
Messengers like keystones bridge the up, the down.
Three saints extend a cloak and white unfurled lilies.
Sister, receive these lilies, take up this cloak,
Walk the bridge that meets the spheres and touches earth.
Before the marble altar, facing our crucified Lord,
St. Catherine kneels and, hand to heart, reaches out-
Accepting what mystics have always known:
Apparitions are more real, saints more themselves.
Everything for God; There is nothing else.
Jeanna Cooper graduated from Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire, in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in Literature. She currently lives in the New River Valley of Virginia with her husband and six daughters.