Cloister

The Convent of St Catherine, Kalymnos


I lie awake in darkness
on the raw edges that trauma leaves,
fingernails still torn from clinging on
to one more precipice,
when like a pair of loving arms
a memory envelops me
and holds me in suspension,
in ekstasis, till the demons flee.

A summer day, a pilgrimage
where limestone spars with the Aegean,
bleached bulwarks of Kalymnos
raise grizzled brows in piety,
and shielded by declivities
and thorns too coarse for goats or donkeys
stands a cloister, henna-domed,
within the rock's chest-cavity.

The courtyard wheels about a well,
crystal font of miracles,
the hub of God's oasis in the wilderness.
Figs and carobs filter noon's remorseless,
stone-inflected gaze, mediating between
earth and heaven, mundane and divine.
When evening dims day's azure face,
constellations coruscate and blister
like the eyes of martyred saints.

Knuckles crack in cooling rock
where thistles whisper thirstily;
vespers gain intensity from voices of the waves
fretting at the limestone
like a half-eroded memory; 
somewhere in the pockets of the night
the crickets sing, and little owls
repeat their plea: "Remember me…"

It is this pilgrimage I now retrace:
in search of inner purity, to stand
outside all circumstance of time and place,
and pain and rage, and frail mortality;
to ask a blessing of St Catherine for the stony
journey, a kind word from her steadfast devotees
in arid Kalymnos, who work on bended knees
to practise charity, and pray for peace…