Aluigi Gonzaga: The Lotus Sutra

Aloysius,
is there a single
secret or seed
of the kingdom
you do not know
or bear
within ?
Born in a most
arrogant time
when belief in the self
and all that one
could do,
had tilted minds
and faces like
elegant Botticellis,
to the new gods
who peered from
the convex and
concave mirrors of the
High Renaissance.
In the painted, sculpted
images of you,
however,
one can still see
the precocious boy
who taught simply,
like the Lost Child,
from the starched
ruff and collar
of your brief
childhood.
Or in Guercino's
masterpiece, you are
a lambent flame,
flickering and burning
neath a smoke of
singing angels
before the
Capuchin cross.
Or in hospitals and hospices
you are captured as
Legros' healing boy,
carrying the sick and dying;
youthful mid-wife to the
second birth,
watching souls pass
like spirit birds
into the Light
of His presence.
And then you are
happily home,
perched on the clouds,
waving a shaft of lilies,
and smiling,
from Pozzo's
trompe d'oeil skies.
But in the shadows
of my night,
when I cannot find
your smile or
the harbor of your wings,
when I fear my limbs
and will
are clay,
I remember you
also grew
from silt and sludge,
and then suddenly
you appear as the
flowering lotus
and this sutra
is all I need
touch and know and hear
of you for
now.

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This page is managed by Fr. Raymond A. Bucko, S.J. of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Creighton University. E-Mail: bucko@creighton.edu Page Last Updated: December 1, 2001

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