British poet Sally Reid began to question her lifelong atheism when she came across a simple icon of the face of Christ in a church in a small Italian village. In her memoir, she “Bright darkness of the night” Reed recalls a time when he felt a strange urge to pray. “Without faith or unbelief, I heard myself honestly and instinctively say, ‘If you’re there, you’re going to help me.'”
What followed was an instant and intuitive experience of God’s presence.
“It was as if birth, crucifixion, and resurrection had been thrust into my being with a beautiful blow. This is what it means to suddenly know the meaning of reality. My heart began to feel its essential structure. “Logic, love, reason,” she writes.
The following poem is “Dawn of this famine” This is Reed’s fourth collection of poetry, and her first since converting. Align would like to thank the author and Angelico Press for the opportunity to share this article this Good Friday.
— Matt Himes
the crucified
I went deaf when I nailed him
Connects to steel shaft via taut wire
In the tendons, through the flesh, past black pain
It erased all thoughts. Have you seen it?
Whisper into my bottomless eyes
I’m sorry — or did it all come later?
Did he look towards the hills in the distance?
The women’s screams reach their climax
I could go faster: I obliged.
Then I got tired and waited until it got dark.
On the cross.But in my dreams I’m still there
As the wind changes the world, the sound of the hammer is deafening.
And I hit harder, I know I can be trained
A stationary point — like a soldering operation
The whitest and hottest metal makes up the fulcrum
Where God merged with us in our unyielding form.
Anger — and hopefully in this chaos.
I’m going to keep all my kids safe at the core.
Of those nails. O my God, how can I bear it?
Was he chosen as a necessary victim?
I pray to the thing that slipped into the long grass
Our silence turned me all upside down.
There are good things about the head of a nail.
sally reed I am a poet, author, and former psychiatric nurse based near Rome, Italy. She is the author of her four poetry collections and her two memoirs, and is the editor of the recent “.100 Great Catholic Poems. ”
