Vigil - Poem

National Catholic Reporter, March 23, 2001 by Marguerite Bouvard

   I gather them up at the frontiers
   of sleep, lift the children out of newsprint;

   the spindly Sudanese baby, a whole country's
   famine echoing in his scream.

   I stroke his forehead, my hands spill
   oranges and bread. On the back pages

   where AIDS in South Africa is rendered
   in three column inches, I open the door

   to the rickety house of a girl
   who tended her parents into their deaths.

   Relatives have moved in, and treat her
   like a servant. I become a tree

   standing over that house,
   my leaves whispering through walls.

--Marguerite Bouvard Wellesley, Mass.