Giving Back
I thought of you this morning, very early.
I mean, the you who feels that you don’t have
a future. The western sky was dark, like night,
while in the east, the sky was running with
a daring blue—I mean, daring to bring day
again into a sightless world. But that was not
what made me think of you, life-stopping
though it was. I thought of you because
a silver moon, as slender as a silver hair,
depended quietly from the urgent sky,
placed just above the life-line of the earth.
At first I asked myself, ‘Is that the moon,
indeed?’ I’d never seen a moon look so chancy,
as though someone’s sigh just happened
to blow a thread into the sky. ‘Perhaps,’ I
thought, ‘it is a lunar fraud?’ But no, my God,
it had to be the moon, this sliver of fine silver,
delicate, unbearable—frightening, almost—
and still, so still. I wanted to hold my breath
in order not to unsettle it. I thought of you,
and wanted to give this moment of the
silver thread moon to you—I mean,
the you who feeds in a universe that takes
so much away from us, sometimes.
Johanna Caton, O.S.B., is a Benedictine nun. She was born in the United States and lived there until adulthood, when her monastic vocation took her to England, where she now resides. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, The Windhover, The Ekphrastic Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other venues, both online and print.
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