Fatima Notes

After reading Elizabeth Brownings sonnets from the Portuguese, I discovered there is no Portuguese. She was in love with death and in so loving death she loved love with a pale fragile beauty from the safe sepulcher of the Victorian heart. Only the rose, seven years in a drawer, moved me, and I wondered where the real Elizabeth had hidden herself among the ruins of antiquity. And whether flash and blood ever fed on the passions of her soul. Where are the horsey voices of the harridans rasping at dawn in Lisbon? Where are the men at the airport after a long days fishing for commerce, and port? Or the pious pilgrims at the plow, kneeling their way down the long mile to the altar of Fatima in the pouring rain, where faith drives the engine of the heart. Out of the body and into the realm of another, the forgotten sky where the saints from another era who were once men, (except Fatima, of course, but she was a girl, not a woman), they complain about the good old days and how even the faithful don't know the first thing about faith.

Portugal notes, not sure when this was written. Aug 9? That's what it says in journal but poem that follows was written Aug 4. Of course I could've misread the date. But I also like this as a prose piece as well. The immediacy, perhaps.



See poem

AFTER READING BROWNING’S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE