Saint Catherine of Siena – a poem by Stephanie V Sears

Saint Catherine of Siena 
 
Aged six, I drink from evening’s clouds 
Gilded by a chalice sunset. 
 
My brother hurries me in his boy wake 
Griping about young sisters and such bothers. 
 
An idea of goodness forms on his nape 
Where the last rays stamp a seal of love. 
 
The detail of creation quickens in me 
Like a marten tasting prey’s blood. 
 
Crepuscular fireworks of vermeil and florins 
Take up with the God of magic. 
 
With all the jackals of sin at my heels 
I feed on sunlight, digest purity. 
 
Neither braided blondness nor clear eyes 
Matter to the black plague. 
 
To renounce the body’s claims,  
I exact starvation from Eucharist to Eucharist. 
 
Living on youth, imploring, carried on 
By the specter of spirit. 
 
Off with death’s uniform,  
I rely on the promise within grief. 

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroin Chic, DASH, The Dawn Treader. The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson published by Adelaide Book 2020.