Orvieto I

In Your Passion You embraced us:

What pain to know

That I cannot be crucified

With arms folded.

I.

We do not exist until we give. And so,

I knew I

was

when

I played the old tunes

of my bedroom and the woods,

in the stirring air of the

Terrazza.

Your love blew me into corners, billowing my clothes and making a

fantastic fool of me.

Still too stunned for weeping, a single drop chilled on

my cheek.

Trembling at the knees. Hardly knowing the blaze of my own smile.

Am I like this?

Can the world be really so

beautiful…

Can I know what I do not own?

Only when,

Then.

II.

If I could only wind myself around one spiral of Your house, fold myself in one cleft of Your walls. I would stay there content for the rest of my life. To trust Your love is gentle as the February sun, no less true because unusually kind. God does no thing in halves. And I must choose. And I will choose – to let You in, with dripping hands, a wildly beating heart, an urge to dance.

And I said, undivided love is true romance.

III.

Know only “grazie” and say it a thousand times. If I could know but one word,

let me know Your Name. So strange

to find the word that sustains the weary in a different same: Gesu.

Gesu, mio amore e speranza.