In honor of the feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, I reprint below a poem that premiered on the Shrine in February of this year, a recollection of a bus-trip through southern Italy while reading the first five chapters of Story of a Soul almost non-stop.

The Transfiguration of Apulia

… Who delights to scatter such masterpieces over the place where we spend our brief time of exile.

—St. Therese of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul

So I looked up from The Story of a Soul and
Put Therese and the Child Jesus to sleep.
And felt the quiet wash over my brain.

Everyone on the bus was drowsing in their naps,
But me.

Around us, rolled green fields
Soft and smooth and rich as velvet,
Golden-green,
Beneath a sea of movie clouds
Hanging low and purple in the sky,
Tops crested wonderfully in white.

The sun came through in great luminous wounds
Rays streaking sidelong like baroque spotlights
As they transfixed a single silver spot,
A nebulous wing, a dragon head,
And this (I thought, not saw) should be the sign:
Twelve stars, a crown,
Ringing round a maiden pure,
Clothed in the sun,
Her feet on the moon
And in her arms a Child.

The telephone poles seemed like rows of crosses.
While ranks of windmills blew on the ridges
Grand enough for an army of giants.
Don Quixote’s nephilim come back from the dead.

Islands of beaten electrum shone
Amid the clouds
Against a sky of virgin blue
Marvelous blue, hazy blue
Rainstorm blue in the distant horizon
Suspended over mountains
Pink as Sicilian angel wings.

Light danced on the leaves, caught on the
Movie screen of the bus window.

It was Apulia, that lost province of Italy,
Yet it seemed
Like some weird Technicolor version of my own Indiana.
The familiar transmuted,
The lily gilded,
The gold refined.

And the clouds parted, like a great lazuli
Amoeba, fringed with light and lined with silver,
Like an oculus,
Its center blinding light.
Clothed with the sun.

It was beautiful as an army with banners,
The rolling green before us,
Around us,
Behind us and within us,
And yet I knew that soon enough
We would see
A new heaven and a new earth,
A New Jerusalem:
And all would come to despairing dust.

Remember man, thou art dust.
And to dust thou wilt return.

But then what shall we do—
Shall we wait in a darkened room
Until the Doom
And think of nothing else?

But even this temporary tent,
This makeshift universe
Has been decorated by a Hand
That saw it was good indeed.

And so we wait:
We, we are troubadors and fools
Jugglers and jokers
Building paper palaces for our God
And so much is the greater glory.

I sat there in the bus
Feeling detached and bodiless
(But not truly bodiless)
As we streaked through the afternoon
And I wondered perhaps if I had already died.