Saint Francis and the sow

Christian Century, August 28, 2002 by Galway Kinnell

Saint Francis and the sow

   The bud
   stands for all things,
   even for those things that don't flower,
   for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
   though sometimes it is necessary
   to reteach a thing its loveliness,
   to put a hand on its brow
   of the flower
   and retell it in words and in touch
   it is lovely
   until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
   as Saint Francis
   put his hand on the creased forehead
   of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
   blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
   began remembering all down her thick length,
   from the earthen snout all the way
   through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
   from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
   down through the great broken heart
   to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
   from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
   blowing beneath them:
   the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

THE REFERENCE to St. Francis evokes the honoring and cherishing of creation in all of its loveliness that mostly is unnoticed and unappreciated. The selection of a "pig," however, pushes Francis's appreciation of the creation, for the "sow," without heavenly perception, is hygienically dangerous and religiously unclean. But in poetic discourse from Francis, the "sow" is redescribed in "long, perfect loveliness," suggesting that a perception of danger and uncleanness has missed the truth of the creature. Thus the poem pushes behind Francis to a verdict from the Creator, "Very good," even on that which the world regards as dangerous and unclean (see 2 Cor. 5:16). Kinnell offers intimate comfort to every reader who sometimes knows his/her own unworthiness and disqualification; at the same time he offers prophetic dissent in a world of hate and dismissiveness too closed to notice what the Creator has known all along about all that the world judges dangerous and unclean. In both the intimate and public, the poet authorizes a redescription of the dangerous and the unclean according to the notice of the Creator.

--Walter Brueggemann is McPheeter Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary.