When the old mystics described religious experiences
\nmaybe it felt a little like this: simply overcome<\/p>\n
as the bell rings ten, sore knees pressed into stone
in the cavernous church looking up to an icon.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s the thirty-eight-degree heat. Maybe
it\u2019s the sorrowful absence of cat hair in my mouth.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s how Saint Genevieve saved a city
through her words. Maybe it\u2019s how she reminds<\/p>\n
me of my friends, of West Belfast, of Sister
Mona\u2019s roses. A gilt figure in Paris lands<\/p>\n
me somehow back to standing in a playground.
Sister Anne. Riley wallpapering her classroom<\/p>\n
in book covers just to show the kids you can be hot
and clever. Niamh speaking tenderly to<\/p>\n
and about the children. The army men who smothered
Mona\u2019s roses with busted sandbags. How the roses<\/p>\n
grew back. The ruins of those murdered rosebushes
nourished whatever was to grow above them.<\/p>\n
All those girls who passed those roses every morning.
All this from the gaze of the patron saint of shepherds.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s not so profound. Maybe I\u2019m just homesick
and you could fry an egg on these Parisian cobbles.<\/p>\n
Or maybe it is. When my eyes dry, I get up from my knees
and take my devotions with me into the brightness.<\/p>\n
M\u00edche\u00e1l McCann is from Derry City. His first collection, Devotion (Gallery, 2024), was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes 2024 and listed as a Book of the Year by RT\u00c9 and The Irish Times. His second collection, Lives of the Saints, is forthcoming with Gallery in 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the old mystics described religious experiences maybe it felt a little like this: simply overcome as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,89484,37256],"class_list":["post-146374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-poems-of-the-week","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}