Stay with us Lord when night fades…

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2022
“Stay with us, Lord Jesus, when hope fades and the night of disappointment falls. Stay with us, for with you our journey presses on and from the blind alleys of mistrust the amazement of joy is reborn. Stay with us, Lord, because with you the night of pain turns into the radiant dawn of life. Let us say, in all simplicity: Stay with us, Lord! For if you walk at our side, failure gives way to the hope of new life. Amen.”
Pope Francis

The Round
by Stanley Kunitz
Light splashed this morning

on the shell-pink anemones

swaying on their tall stems;

down blue-spiked veronica

light flowed in rivulets

over the humps of the honeybees;

this morning I saw light kiss

the silk of the roses

in their second flowering,

my late bloomers

flushed with their brandy.

A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,

so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,

so I am sitting in semi-dark

hunched over my desk

with nothing for a view

to tempt me

but a bloated compost heap,

steamy old stinkpile,

under my window;

and I pick my notebook up

and I start to read aloud

and still-wet words I scribbled

on the blotted page:

“Light splashed…

“I can scarcely wait till tomorrow

when a new life begins for me

as it does each day,

as it does each day.


“The Round” by Stanley Kunitz, from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. © W.W. Norton, 2000. Reprinted with permission.

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