Assisi

by Jenna K Funkhouser

It is here, on a cool and utterly still day

On Patmos, that Assisi comes again to me:

Flushed with late summer sun as she was then,

When we arrived through fields dry and olive-filled

As these ones, thirsty and luck-bound

In our blessed ignorances.

We barely knew, then, what it meant to venerate

A life that shone ahead like a mid-day star;

How to stumble into churches with their damp

Stone and let a prayer rise to our lips like heat,

Or what to take from the cacophony of tales.

But I know that when we followed blindly

The line of eager souls and found ourselves

Walking the circle path around that tomb, our hearts

Burned then just as if we knew what miracle

Had formed, as if we could have cast our hearts

Three years hence, and seen the ways that seed

Would root in a desert land, circling again

And again around the astonishment

Of a love deep enough to hang our lives upon.

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Jenna K Funkhouser is a Pacific Northwest based storyteller and poet. Her poetry has been published by The Ekphrastic Review, As It Ought To Be, and Spiritus Journal, and is forthcoming at The Penwood Review, among others. Her second book of poetry, Bright Inhabited Lives, was published by Kelsay Books in June 2024.