Excerpt from the 4th Glorious Mystery

“…Patient and loving, Mary played her part,
Mother to infant Church,
Who once had been
Mother to Him, its Founder and its Head,
True, undivided, real, yet mystical.
She was the Woman vested with the sun,
To light their apostolic paths.
She gently turned the key that led them forth,
These new adopted sons,
To danger and the conquest of the earth.
In welcome Mary stretched her arms
When with the fetid breath of murder
On their sweaty necks
They sought and found her home and safety.
There sat they at her feet
To tell the tales of triumph, sudden shining death,
Of prison, shipwreck, treason, martyrdom
For Him, her Son, their Leader.
In her delighted ear they whispered –
Wonder making words to falter –
How because they spoke His name,
The temples fell, the demons fled,
Leprosy vanished in the blush of youthful flesh.
Timid and hesitant
They walked the streets of alien towns
And cities known with vaguest vagueness,
Only to find tripping upon their lips
The native speech, untaught, unlearned, unknown.
It leaped across the moat of listening men,
Reaching their hearts, piercing their inner souls,
To win conviction and the love of Christ
From utter pagans....


“…For there were lilies where her body lay.
Roses were where her feet in death had pressed.
And in the place assigned to stinking death,
The scent of violets, wisteria,
The perfume born of flowers as yet unknown,
Never to be of earth.
The yawning grave seemed in its joy to smile.
The clay unwatered was a bowery.”