Poetry reading: The Missionary

Geoff Ryan reads one of his poems

O

God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”
George Bernard Shaw

“I do not promise you an easy life. You may have to sacrifice all that is dear to you. You are not to come to God merely to be happy or to gain peace, but in order to carry out his will.”
Kate Booth

“I have been so violently uprooted and plunged so deeply into a job too big for me, that everything feels unreal. I have dropped all I ever did, and live only as a thief of opportunity…so it’s a kind of foreign stage, on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language with a price of failure on one’s head if the part is not well filled.”
T. E. Lawrence

“But you, my own little mother, have to suffer because you have these singular children who have to be redeemed by a revolution or by joining in a world war; for others it may suffice to attend Miss Zahle’s School or to learn to drive a car, this causing infinitely less worry. And yet there are not a few singular people in the world, explorers to the North Pole, artists and members of the Salvation Army, whose mothers have been forced to fold their hands and reconcile themselves to the fact that it was their children’s fate and fortune to take these winding roads.”
Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)

The Missionary

Pale skin stretched tautly
Over delicately phantom bones.
Thoughtful, timeless,
Her body pauses like wax.
Tight efficient smiles
Punctuating appropriate moments in the conversation.
Decidedly disinterested in what little
She has ordered.
She does her duty
And picks at it,
Spindle fingers fiddle with coffee creamers,
As she for the most part,
Uses the window pane
As an intermediary in her conversation
She’s not with me.

- - -

Geoff Ryan reads The Missionary

- - -

Occasionally a subject touched upon
Will invoke the cheerful girl I knew before.
Or righteous indignation will well up
Replete with tightened lips,
Emphatic fingers,
Dark eyes.
Mainly though,
She is most happy to lapse into
That otherworldliness peculiar to her calling.
A legacy of days and years
Expended in titanic efforts of Godliness
Amid alien everything.
Damaged by eons of self-neglect,
Past paltry limits of human flesh and blood.
We, with our crumbling feet of clay.
It is the price she has paid,
Her badge of courage.

I can neither understand nor enter
Her world.
I have no right.
And often change the conversation’s course
So once more I can be included.
Long pauses are frequent,
Again and again
She looks, acknowledges, absorbs,
Without seeing, caring, understanding.
The drums take over
And the silent need of millions
Fills her head.

She will return, of course.
She does not belong her anymore
A misfit,
Her heart has been cut out
As surely as were her forebearers’
Centuries back.
She’s awkward and makes us uncomfortable.
Her experiences take no leave from her,
They are her.
And she stumbles and bangs her way
Through each day,
A blind cripple.
The grasping materialism of the city
Shames her deeply,
The very garbage bins irk her
She tries to understand and remember when…
The effort to accommodate taxes greatly
She knows we have no excuse
We are wrong.

Eventually she will end up back here again
Years down the road.
It will no longer be home
But roots will beckon irrationally
And pull her back.
And she will join that saintly throng
Of those “returned home”,
Who smile much
And exude a peace we can but approach with awe.
They function, I suppose
But mostly in reverie and unobtrusiveness.

They have seen Jesus
And are already in another realm.
One suspects,
Spending most days in Heaven,
But at present seeing fit
To allow their human frame
To occupy a small space
Here among us,
So as not to let us off the hook too easily
I suppose.

Writer: Geoff Ryan is co-founder and publisher of theRubicon and co-ordinator of the 614 Network. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto.

Attention all poets - theRubicon is looking for poetry and poets willing to read their poems for publication. Interested? Contact theRubicon today.

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