Daniel Berrigan, S.J. : Tulips in the Prison Yard

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Daniel Berrigan S.J.

Tulips in the Prison Yard

Many poets, believe me, could do better by your

sovereign beauty, your altogether subtle

transfiguration of blank nature –

so winds, nights, sunlight

colorless wraiths, are drawn into

what can only be called a “new game.”

Well.     I will not glory

In infirmity.     Yeats, Wordsworth would look once

breathe deeply, sharpen their quills,

with a flourish pluck you from time.

But.

You are jail-yard blooms, you wear bravery with a difference.

You are born here will die here;

making you, by excess of suffering

and transfiguration of suffering, ours.

I see prisoners pass

in the dead spur of spring, before you show face

Are you their glancing tears

the faces of wives and children, the yin yang of hearts

to fro like hanged necks

perpetual cruelty, absurdity?

The prisoners

pass and pass; shades  of men, pre-men,

khaki ghosts, shame, futility.

Between smiles, between reason for smiles, between

life as fool’s pace and life as celebrant’s flame –

aeons.

Yet, thank you.     Against the whips

of ignorant furies, the slavish pieties of judas priests

you stand, a first flicker in the brain’s soil, the precursor

of judgment.

Dawn might be, man may be

or

spelling it out in the hand’s palm

of a blind mute.

God is fire, is love

Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. >>> MORE…

Book:

Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

prison poems

Foreword by Philip Berrigan

All the poems Daniel Berrigan wrote during 18 months in Danbury Prison

Unicorn Press, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1973

ISBN 0-87775-049-1