Saint Francis and The Sow

This remarkable and well known poem has so many rich layers but it is

the “understanding that ‘sometimes it is necessary / to re-teach and " put a hand on the brow", to rekindle that divine essence within all of us that grabs my attention today. 

God touches our brows every day with original blessings and re-teaches us our true origins and affirms the value of our lives until "we flower from within ".

I pray that I may strive to do the same to all I meet this week, animals and humans !

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
or 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. 

Click here to hear the poem read by the author Galway Kinnell 

Delightful scene from the film Babe where Farmer Hogget sings ( and dances) to his sick pig....

and possibly the best line of the film ....

 More from Kinnell :


I say “God”; I believe,
rather, in a music of grace
that we hear, sometimes, playing to us
from the other side of happiness.

When we hear it, when it flows
through our bodies, it lets us live
these days lighted by their vanity
worshipping — as the other animals do,
who live and die in the spirit
of the end — that backward-spreading
brightness…

Galway Kinnell