His Holy Name
In this secular world
There is one belief I hold dear:
I am a child of God;
I belong to Him,
Who is perfect love.
He is my most valued friend,
My loving and constant protector.

May I never lose sight of His face,
Never cease to speak his Holy name,
For fear that He should become
One of �The Disappeared�,
Taken and ruthlessly silenced,
Year after long-suffering year.

Fledglings
Unravelling woven intricacies
Of an abandoned nest
Finding fragments of speckled eggs
Rummaging later in the attic
For that old ornithological guide
Stumbling in the dimming light
Feeling something give beneath my feet
Discovering the broken hand
Of her first Christmas doll
Picking up fragments of wan porcelain
Cradling them in the folds of my palm.

Tsunami Disaster
Lights of life put out,
Thousands without trace,
Pain and suffering and loss
On a shocking scale.
Children numbed, parents robbed
Of their families, all they possessed.
But through this darkness runs a vital thread
Connecting them and us,
A common humanity that recognises
Brothers and sisters, in the injured,
The homeless, the distressed.
And so we rally to freely give from the heart
What we can, then, just when we think
We have given all and it is it done,
We discover one more precious thing
We each can give:
Through prayer, through fasting,
We can give hope, through love.

Dawn of a new day
New skins will hold,
Keep tight within their walls
New wines,
Just so the soul
When sins have been
Absolved and grace renewed,
We are as temples,
With radiant light imbued.

Grandmother
Petite, dressed in blue or black,
And, except in bed,
A crocheted hat to keep
Her pinned-up hair intact.
She always sat on the edge of a seat                                            
As if to meet the floor half-way
With tiny, dangling feet.
Constantly at her side, a stack of little
Cards, edged black, and prayer books
Softened and dog-eared with years-                                  
St. Anthony�s Treasury,
An hour Before the Blessed Sacrament,
Prayers to the Sacred Heart.
With glasses on the end of her nose,
She would pray for the happy repose
Of relatives and friends,
Prayers of the faithful.

Corpus Christi
No longer bread,
No longer wine,
His body and His blood
Through sacrifice are mine.
Without such nourishment
My soul would be
A wasting headland
Above a raging sea,
A rootless acreage
With neither leaf nor tree.

Questions
He moves barefoot through grass and reeds
One hand�s sweep can scythe a field
Some have asked if what I hear,
If what I see,
Is real
Or plain imaginary.

My answer is silent as the rain
That strings glass beads on wires and frames
And springs the earth to life again
That it might yield fine barley.