Aquero

 Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes

Lourdes Chapel, National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington DC

In the summer of 1964, I spent a lot of time praying in this little chapel in the crypt of the National Shrine.   It wasn't until October of 2004 that I was able to visit the actual place in France.

This is an interesting song by Leonard Cohen, who was not Catholic, about the story, with lots of personal embellishments:

Song of Bernadette      by Leonard Cohen

There was a child named Bernadette
I heard the story long ago
She saw the Queen of Heaven once
And kept the vision in her soul
No one believed what she had seen
No one believed what she heard
But there were sorrows to be here
And mercy, mercy in this world

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we've done and can't undo
I just want to hold you, come on let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do
 
 We've been around, we fall, we fly
We mostly fall, we mostly run
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we've done
Tonight, tonight I just can't rest
I've got this joy inside my breast
To think that I did not forget that child
That song of Bernadette

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we've done and can't undo
I just want to hold you, won't let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do
I just want to hold you, come on let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

In more recent years, I read that Bernadette called the Lady "Aquero" in her Basque dialect, which means "that one there."  It was Aquero herself who identified herself to Bernadette as "I am the Immaculate Conception."

In the deep bare garden

 

Anna Berezovskaya

I love this poem by Philip Larkin.  

Coming    

 

On longer evenings,

Light, chill and yellow,

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses.

A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,

It will be spring soon –

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.

Claude Monet

An unhindered goldfinch

 

February 1 is the Feast of Saint Brigid of Kildare.

Here are two poems about her from Seamus Heaney:

A Brigid's Girdle

(from The Spirit Level)

Last time I wrote I wrote from a rustic table

Under magnolias in South Carolina

As blossoms fell on me, and a white gable

As clean-lined as the prow of a white liner

Bisected sunlight in the sunlit yard.

I was glad of the early heat and the first quiet

I'd had for weeks. I heard the mocking bird

And a delicious, articulate

Flight of small plinkings from a dulcimer

Like feminine rhymes migrating to the north

Where you faced the music and the ache of summer

And earth's foreknowledge gathered in the earth.

Now it's St Brigid's Day and the first snowdrop

In County Wicklow, and this a Brigid's Girdle

I'm plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop

(Like one of those old crinolines they'd trindle),

Twisted straw that's lifted in a circle

To handsel and to heal, a rite of spring

As strange and lightsome and traditional

As the motions you go through going through the thing.



From Crossings
On St. Brigid's Day the new life could be entered

By going through her girdle of straw rope

The proper way for men was right leg first

Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left

Shoulder, arm and leg.

Women drew it down

Over the body and stepped out of it

The open they came into by these moves

Stood opener, hoops came off the world

They could feel the February air

Still soft above their heads and imagine

The limp rope fray and flare like wind-born gleanings

Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

Art by Mickey O'Neil McGrath