Fortitude

I wrote this poem for two reasons: 1) to preserve the details of a particularly vivid dream I had years ago, and 2) as an exercise in blank verse. With the exception of the two closing lines of alexandrines, the poem is all iambic pentameter.

 

I had this dream years before I returned to the Church. Later, during the discernment of my religious vocation, I chanced to glance through St Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle  and was astounded at the similarity between my dream and some passages in Second Mansions. This didn't really influence my decision to enter the monastery, but I did feel that the Spirit was speaking to my subconscious, even though at the time of the dream I had no idea what it meant.

Fortitude

Its bleak, imposing walls were banked with thorns;
Its mullioned windows, hulled unblinking eyes,
Kept watch upon the silent stretch of mead.
It stood as if in wait for someone who,
Like me, has wandered through this somber land
To start anew, unfettered by old sins.
Beyond the ranks of walls, beyond the mead,
I saw a forest beckoning with songs
Of hidden sparrows, verdant shade to soothe
My weary limbs, and brooks to cleanse away
With healing lays the dust of sodden years.

But thorns grew tangled thick around the walls
That stood between me and that blessèd place;
They hid the ground to left, the ground to right;
The only way I saw to paradise
Was through the walls and out the farther side.
I ran, I know not how; I could not feel
My feet, but trusted that they carried me
Despite the trepidation in my heart.

And there the timbered door stood opened wide,
A gaping mouth in wait for prey, for those
Who go undaunted through its splintered jaws.
I could not feel my feet, still less the ground;
But air tore past me sharply on my way
Through darkness of a narrow corridor,
A strangled throat of cold and damp, and on
Towards a faint and faintly winking light.

From dark to light, a sudden brutal shock;
From narrow hall to courtyard, savage bright,
And teeming with a mass of flicking tongues
And glinting scales. I felt my courage clamp
Itself around my throat, an iron band
Through which my breath came forth a ragged thread.
I had no feet at all, or so it seemed;
I only knew my body fought its way
Across the writhing courtyard floor, above
The slithering mass that stabbed and snapped the air
About my legs.

                                              I saw a gate ahead
That opened on the mead. Its doors were not
The splintered jaws that I had met before;
These welcomed with the promise of new life.
The band about my throat sprang loose; relieved,
I felt once more the grass beneath my feet;
Once more I saw across a thorn-less mead
The longed-for wood, a little nearer now,
And felt my blood, that had grown cold with fright,
Become a pulsing joy through all my limbs.

The walls stood stark behind me, draped in heavy past,
And hope lay green beneath a widening arc of light.

© Leticia Austria 2008