A Thought on Sunday:

    VERMEER, MY MOTHER AND  ME

    From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters c.p.

    Sunday , June 27 , 2010

Roof and sky and chimney stacks,

the blue,  the white,  the reddish browns,           

how he might have seen Westfield Road

and the coppergreen spires of Mount Argus

from the window of my childhood bedroom

I can gather from a little corner

of his Little Street,  and the almost

unremarkable presence in it

of a woman bent over in her own back yard,

who is leaning for a mop in a wooden bucket

and who just might be my mother

at our kitchen door,  her eyes cast down

to the shore that’s clogged and stinking again

as she takes in a breath –

filled with the smells of grass and apples,

coal dust,  Jeyes fluid,  and the sugary

toffee scent from the factory down the road –

that will,  when she raises her head,

come out with my name on it, my own

two syllables making their instant way

back through the kitchen,  along the narrow hall,

up the dark-carpeted ,  big windowed bedroom

where I’ll hear that name and her known voice

shaping it,  making it quick,  making me

be there,  myself in the very moment

when our daily life – defined 

by cloud-broken blue sky and the ginger

bricks of gable ends, radiance of roof tiles

and wet chimneys – has to happen ,  there

where she’s calling me to come,  quick,  to help her.

Be patient with this poem by Eamon Grennan,  who grew up in this area,  and you will find it most rewarding.  It is one long sentence broken by dashes.  He is back as a child wondering how Vermeer would see his own view of the world.  Would he have painted it as “unremarkably” as Little Street?  But how could it be unremarkable when it is his alone?  And this boy has a name that becomes incredibly special when uttered from his mother’s lips.  

You have two months till next Bulletin to study it!    Enjoy the summer!