Sunday 2 February 2014

Dana Gioia- genuine poet or fake Catholic?

He was a smart guy, a nice guy, a good looking guy. He married someone as lovable as himself. They had a child who died.
Many years later he wrote this-

Majority

Now you’d be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you’d be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife. 

 This is a genuine poem- no question. It's actually a great poem though it doesn't concern itself with greatness. It is full of art, without being artful. It has 'ma'ani afrini' - meaning creation- 'mazmun afrini'- theme creation- and, by its fecundly inventive accentual fractal structure, it actually does exhaust its theme, in the proper Baroque manner, thus instantiating a kenosis, and qualifying as a proper Scholastic or Sufi synteresis.
But is it Catholic?
I ask because, clearly, it is a poem and it is a 'guarding of the heart' and both can be Catholic but
reading it
Tears are our Theotokos
(Allamma Prabhu!)
Whose Christ is lost to Geist.

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