While I work on the fourth book in the series, “Christian Poetry of the Sacred,” I have begun a new series of poems entitled “Diary of Old Age.” In September I leave the septuagenarian world and cross the threshold into octogenarian folklore, that mythic time of love and death, beauty and death, imagination and death, solitary silence, and death, wonder and death, but most of all a legendary time for growth in learning, godly intimacy, life. As Fr. John Powell said, “Lord, don’t let me die without having really lived and really loved.”
Let us look at four poems from the “Diary of Old Age” series and see what this old man feels are crucial enough to write about. The first one focuses upon that oldie but goody, love, the reason we are here this moment reading these words. As the Doobie Brothers sang “Where would you be without love, right now?” Not only would we not be anywhere, we simply would not be.
Old age can be a magnificent opportunity for growing into life and love, finally and at last. A fine time for God to make saints of us. As Leon Bloy stated “The greatest tragedy in life is not to have become a saint.” And what is a saint? To a saint is a person whose heart and soul are ever Godward through all the sufferings, pains, loses, and nearness of death that old age brings, along with all the amazement at being alive, having a Christ-hope, and experiencing the seeds of bliss that go full bloom on the Other Side, in full, unselfconscious presence with God and the “cloud of witnesses.”
To the poems. No. 28 talks about love being “a dreadful and divine thing” not a sentiment or feeling in the moment, but a radical experience “deadly and auspicious,”
Love in reality
is innocent &
harsh beyond
all embarrassment,
a radical giving
through suffered
excruciating grace.
Here's the full poem:
Diary of Old Age, No. 28
Love in reality,
is a dreadful
& divine thing,
dangerous itself
& a reckoning
deadly & auspicious,
a striptease of soul
& vulnerable heart
in the dark night
of all the senses.
Beyond sentiments
& shoddy calculations,
love in ancient age
is a liminal gate
to luminous surprise
& sacred absurdity
of loving in extreme
without cravings
with God’s love
for God alone
without doubt
or death’s fear.
Love in reality
is innocent &
harsh beyond
all embarrassment,
a radical giving
through suffered
excruciating grace.
[First published in Soul Forte]
I will let No. 30 speak for itself about the “grotesque grace” of silent solitude:
Diary of Old Age, No. 30
God has given me
a terrible & baffling
gift, a singularly
grotesque grace,
the desert fire
of rogue solitude
in its intensities
& latent potentials
for loneliness
or the mystery
of being alone
with God alone
in timely eternity
before death.
Suffered, necessary
solitude as threshold
crucible passage
into the drama
of divine life
& disappearing
in a wilderness
of silent solitary
sacred communion.
[First published in Soul Forte]
Have you ever seen Jesus Christ? Can you see Christ? What if we have, but did not realize it, if our egos got in the way and blinded us to the Lord’s presence in special and ordinary times? What if the face of Christ, that is, His revolutionary Presence, is both hidden and obvious at the same time? Full of paradox and irony.
Here is the whole of No. 34:
Diary of Old Age, No. 34
Carried on sacrificial winds
across thresholds of time
between here & eternity
the concealed & opaquely
obvious face of Jesus,
inscrutable in simplicity
mystical in suffered love,
appears as an unborn
about to be aborted
in eruptions of pure pain,
as a wailing Jewish baby
dispatched into perfect
silence on an Auschwitz day,
in the corrupted angel’s face
of an abandoned child
of the streets at dawn,
as palpable obscurity
of a solitary old woman
forgotten by everyone,
even in shrouded ambiguities
of anxious & depressed souls,
in the scared eyes of despair,
prisoners of addictive demons
& all those killing Christ today.
[First published in Soul Forte]
The last poem for today is No. 35. As you read it, no matter what your age, our own death is a companion through the years and probably the best way to learn to accept death as real for me too, not just for others, is to look death in the eye and live with full awareness of it, instead of fearing it and looking around the next corner for it.
death becomes a strange
friend, elliptical companion
encircling my ways & days
with intricate intensities
soberly reminding me
of God’s total intoxication
Intoxication? As St. Catherine of Siena said in the 14th century, our God is crazing in love with us, to the point of divine and beautiful madness, loving each one of us as if we were the only one existing (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas), a personal, salvific, unrelenting, infinite love for you and me. Imagine that. What if it is really true?
Diary of Old Age, No. 35
A poetic diary of old age
is a thinly disguised diary
of death intruding upon
the ancient dance of life.
As years accumulate &
my body wrinkles & withers
passing into my 9th decade
of breathing inexorably
to that final rite of passage
of summarily disappearing
from earthen habit of being
into ever-nascent eternity,
death becomes a strange
friend, elliptical companion
encircling my ways & days
with intricate intensities
soberly reminding me
of God’s total intoxication
by ineffably personal love
for the living & dying me,
a love born from death.
[First published in Soul Forte]
These poems along with others from the same series, and with many from an even longer series, “Poems to God,” as well as other poetry will be included in book 4 which I hope will be available by mid-fall, 2025. Until the next blog post, may God bless you with a poetic imagination for all your written and unwritten poetry. Robert Browning said that God is the perfect poet. Thus, to be poetic in spirit is to seek to imitate God.