In 1995, Mary McKillop was Beatified, a step along the arcane road to her eventual sainthood in 2010 (a first for an Australian) in the magical realist world that is the Catholic Church. I wrote this for a Josephite nun (the order that Mary started) on her ‘marriage’ to God, to remind her not much had changed since Mary’s time..

You have your own poor

amidst your own wealth,

no less distant

from short-arm jabs

and handouts from the deep pockets of their own stolen goods.

 

You have your own wordless

asleep in your library,

no less hungry

for a roadside snack

while thumbing a ride on the information super-highway.

 

You have your own ‘orphans’

surrounding your family,

no less abandoned

than refugees,

distantly disguised by the soft focus of history.

 

You have your own excommunicated,

the ‘disappeared’ in your community,

no less denied

for their difference

when you send in the clones.

 

You have your own bureaucrats

framing your love of God,

no less certain

in their knowledge

than a hundred years ago.

 

At the end,

there is no more life left to tell

but your own,

saintly in its endless beginnings.