MAKE ME AN INSTRUMENT OF PEACE
For the Saint on Whose Feast Day I was Born
We’re all Maestros and Monks of love in the making
The only way I have a prayer of getting my head fatly around forgiveness, of releasing my clenched fist of a heart – that my wrath and sorrow might bud bat wings and soar blindly from resentment’s cave for the sun, incinerating themselves –
is to remember my training.
I have practiced daily – reciting, with every slashed wrist and wrenching twist of the wrong kind of memory, the prayer of my patron. The one
who spills so much light that even my eyes, clouded from too many re-readings of eclipsing tea leaves, recognize these words
are footprints for sinking spirit and toes into
as devotedly as it takes until I, too, am a fool for love. A viola of peace singing with strings of gut and steel — reverberating, resolute – the song of the most beautiful spheres.
My bow, a bulrush exorcised of its desire to scourge.
All octaves of trust, hope, joy, consolation, empathy,
pardon
perfectly pitched, vibrato mirroring the stars’ faces
and the moon’s — even when she is new, unseen. Waiting patiently backstage to wax our bettered selves to a gleam. Maestros and monks in the making.
©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2023
Dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
Thank you, team, at Blue Insights for the home — Francine Fallara, Thomas Plummer, David Rudder, Victoria Ponte, Iulia Halatz, Gurpreet Dhariwal, KS Copeland. Thank you, dearest readers. Love.
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