Editor’s Note: Each October, Catholics celebrate a month dedicated to the Rosary, highlighted by the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7. This year, the Jesuit Media Lab will offer several creative works connected to the Rosary; read the first piece written by the poet and author Phil Metres.
I’m sorry that the workings of the world
have made their ugliness known to you —
the vision shattered like a picture frame
on the floor. I mean a larger pane
you might never see. I will not blind you
to the world.
Still, tell me something
I can do, some beads to pray each day,
some patron saint to sheet you in the love
that is a medicine, to keep you for a minute
shielded and unburned, still sensitive
to give and give, clear-eyed enough
to see things as they are — the shards
as small, hard pieces of your art.
Artist Statement:
I wrote this for my daughter, a poet and an artist — someone who is sensitive to pain and beauty and wonder. Through art, pain can be transformed into a sort of beauty. I think often of Willa Cather’s short story, “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” in which an artist’s pupil returns to his master’s hometown to find a world of overblown emotion and ugliness and materialism; but when he sees this world, he sees just how wonderful his master’s creations were — all the more beautiful for having been born out of suffering. This, I think, is the role of the poet and artist — to use one’s gifts to bring a shadowed world to light.