celebrate!

This poem is dedicated to you, Dick, and all the angels that come in Grace, Word, and Faith. As I watched this speech in Congress, messages began to reveal your road to recovery. "Where two or three are gathered" or millions tuning in, many prayers were happening, and still will.

            on Pope Francis’ US speech

Gentle man, you ask as if the world depends on it

to pray for you, as if you need more God support,

and that the homeless child in Bethlehem could be

just as likely you, or one of us, begging unknown

happenstance. Lincoln dreamed a liberated voice

a century on could more than galvanize the mall;

Dorothy Day shone lives entrenched in shadows;

Merton, as a monk, shed solitude for dialogue and

mentored trained myopia to imagine a blind end.

When I was four, I linked my middle name to MLK,

not my grandpa or the priest of Wittenberg, whose

modus to ‘sin boldly’ met with operandi ‘believe

more bold.’ Dad relished my naïveté, reminded me

of lambs to come pointing to the Lamb of Calvary.