Intercession by Amy Cotter

With shaking hands, oh St. Gerard I plea,

please speak to the ears of the one most high.

With a full heart and on my bended knee,

I ask for your help, I need to get by.

You performed miracles for the unborn.

You have brought ease for mothers in labor.

You have done so much, for you are adorn.

I ask from you a miracle of lore.

I have mourned too many losses, you see,

of my children whom the Lord wanted.  

 I don’t want to lose this new one in me;

your devotion to my unborn needed.

The doctors have said not to expect much.

She would be born with problems of all sorts.

A minor factor to worry of such,

I will always love her, as I do now.

Please bring this message to the Lord on high.

He will listen to you, a loyal saint.  

One in which many have gone to rely,

for your miracles are not one to taint.

The patron saint of children, the unborn;

a saint for all the expecting mothers.

My novella pamphlets for you well worn,

as I pray each night, a full life for her.

As December slowly approaches by,

please be with her the whole time; on the fly.

Tell her to relax, rest, to take her time.

Teach her to say her prayers in her prime.

To love one another as God showed us to,

and to be patient, as I learned from you.

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Poem of the Day: Psalm

BY EMILY WARN

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps,

with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash,

I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You.

No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes.

No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars.

No Lord I know what is within magnified.

Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night.

Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns

for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole

as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three am

in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You.

If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins,

balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two,

it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped

watched dimension quarters us into early middle late.

Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning

is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea

each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.