The Leonard Feeney Omnibus
A COLLECTION OF PROSE AND VERSE OLD AND NEW

Leonard Feeney, S. J.

New York
Sheed and Ward

1943

The Cloud

Song should come promptly when the eye beholds

A Himalaya floating off in folds,

In wayward vales of silent plume-like lather:

Song should be swift the gist of that to gather,

Have fixed in snow-flame phrases and dispensed

This continent of quiet uncondensed,

Ere the explosion into forks of fire,

The crash and downpour of a frail empire

Whose trickling ruins the minnow shall be fond of

Soon, and paper boats sail on the pond of.

Sun and Moon

The sun begets the shadow,

The moon the silhouette;

The noon is for Narcissus,

The night for Juliet.

The image in the water,

The idol in the sky,

Are opposites that alter

The angle of the eye.

The love behind the window,

The truth within the wave,

Will keep the heart unhappy

And make the head behave.

The bridge is set for vanity,

The balcony for pride: -

Beneath a man his body

And above a man his bride!

The Buttercup

I always come in multitudes; I am part of a festival

Of buttercups, each buttercup so rare and dear and small,

Alone, I guess I am practically no buttercup at all.

What praise I get a million ways must promptly divided be,

Who am but one little flaming note in a vast symphony

Of buttercups in your meadow, as far as your eye can see.

The rather common kitchen nomenclature that I wear,

Like a good humble buttercup, perforce, of course, I bear;

Though the items in my title were a much later affair

Than I, who in ancient Paradise Our Father did allow

To grow and become a buttercup as sweet as I am now,

Aeons before your crockery, centuries before your cow.

The Doves

The doves, - they fly to the moonlit elms and cry: Tickitacoo! Tickitacoo!,

The whole night through.

They tell their loves in a song that has but a note or two:

Tickitacoo! Tickitacoo!

That’s all they do.

And on and on till dawn, while the world is sleeping and all the other birds are too,

They wake and shake the silvery leaves with a strain that is never old, and never new.

There’s snow upon their feathers, but their breasts are full of flame.

The seasons change, but still their melody stays the same:

Tickitacoo! Tickitacoo!

Ever soft and true.

Tears

Through metal and through glass

The transcendentals pass.

Water must forgive

The sieve,

And sunshine dare not say

The window was in its way.

So, in the alternate enterprise

Of light and liquid in the living eyes,

That soak with sorrow every sweet surprise,

Perhaps when people weep we should not rue

That it is good and we are glad they do.

Four Apostrophes to Silence

I am harried and hounded with Hush, Hush,

All through the voice-vacated night.

Whirlpools of respite around me rush;

Quiet consumes me quite.

Finger on lip, is the countersign.

A whisper were worse than a word;

While a delicate thunder I know is Divine,

Booms, and is never heard.

Nothing is ever hid:

Nothing you ever dreamed or did.

It gets into the gestures,

It trickles through the tones,

And in our ultimate vestures

Will rearrange the bones.

No voice is ever drowned.

Nothing becomes a stillness that once was a sound.

III

My only grievance against God,

Towards Whom no grievance could ever be,

Is that all even is never odd

And two and one are always three.

Little Miss Troubled Heart is trying

To say what love cannot say:

Slumberless all the night and sighing,

Half asleep all the day.

Little Miss Troubled Heart is telling

With breast sobbing and eye welling,

Not even a millionth part

Of what is troubling Little Miss Troubled Heart.

What the spirit knows

Gives us repose.

But what the spirit wills is

What kills us.

The Incomparable

A little less softly than a breeze

The Incomparable goes;

But this because of the necessities

Of substance, I suppose,

And the noisy abundance of her hair:

A distinctly relative affair,

Not noticed until I am compelled to compare

The Incomparable with a breeze that blows.

A little more muffled than a bird’s

Her voice leaps into sound;

But this because of the natural weight of words,

Which even in the most thrush-like throat is found

Of all our gentle daughters.

The Incomparable’s ways are wilder than the waters,

And her innocence most poised to please

When least assaulted by my similes.

The Evergreen

When crimson beauty stales an autumn sky,

And leaves in lovely rot come floating down,

The birch, for shroud, will shade its swaddling gown,

The maple will be fickle to its dye;

Sumac and elm will both begin to sigh

For alien tints of lavender and brown,

Envy a golden evening cloud’s renown, -

But I my true love-hue will not lay by.

Earth bred me in the mead, aye in the mud,

And in no sunset lacquer will I preen;

Fidelity is in my root, my blood,

And color-loyal all my tribe hath been.

Leaf vowed to leaf, whatwhile we were in bud,

To ever be forever evergreen.

Entia Multiplicanda

In the little kingdom

Of thingdom

That has no soul,

A pebble will tinkle and roll

In a bric-a-brac bowl;

By the brewing and brothing

Of silver and steel

A knick-knack is never not nothing

And a trinket is real.

By repulsion, attraction

Devoid of all immanent action,

The length, breadth and thickness of stuff

Is existence enough

In the little kingdom

Of thingdom.

In the little kingdom

Of thingdom

Where shells become pearls;

Where diamonds are princes and princesses, emeralds earls,

The well-fueled ruby will flash,

The coin on the counter will clash;

There’s a lovely alarm for the ear,

Were there someone to hear;

There’s a mineral meaning to find,

Were there only a mind,

In the little kingdom

Of thingdom.

In the little kingdom

Of thingdom

Where hands are all handles,

The lady was pleased to put shiny white sticks under lily-white candles,

With one of her fingers residing in ringdom,

A beautiful pledge evermore

That was bought in a honeymoon store,

One day, in the little kingdom

Of thingdom.

Reveille

(for the Carmelites)

Now see them stand at strict liturgical attention:

The athletes who teach the body how to pray;

Who think no work but worship worth the mention,

Determined that there is no other way

Save through the solitudes to reach salvation

And the secret singularities of the soul,

Each measuring her strength in meditation

Before the plunge through darkness to the Goal.

There will be time enough for lights and lilies

When veils are shed and lids lie on the eyes.

Now, at a soundless hour when sleep the sillies,

Pull the bell-rope again and wake the wise!

Virgin Most Prudent

May after May I see by candlelight

Above an icon that I kneel below,

Her head in shadow nodding left and right,

Most sweetly and discreetly nodding No.

Year after year I must agree to let her

Decide what to provide me for my good;

Pray as I may, I cannot ever get her

To grant what would be wonderful if she would.

Spring comes, and little birds make warble.

Snow thaws, but not Our Lady of the Snows.

Tapers I melt before relentless marble.

Poems I write from what to live is prose.

After the Little Elevation

O wheat-like, white, little, still-as-death,

Circumferenced Jesus of Nazareth;

My duty, Your beauty to recondite,

To fashion You frangible, frail and light.

You come translucent to hold and handle,

To peer clear through, Dear, and see a candle,

With a tractable trait to elate my heart

Who make You and take You and break You apart: -

Yet sever You never, St. Thomas said,

For wetness to water is not more wed

Than these twin fragments I now expand,

In my left, in my right, in my either hand.

The Saints have gazed at in other guise

This Body, ecstatics with other eyes;

But sinners with semblances rest content:

Its measure and mould as a Sacrament.

So daily at dawn, by the grace of Mary,

With well-worn words in a voice I vary,

I give God God, and at God’s behest,

For whatever may ease her or please her best.

Resurrection

In crocus fashion, sunlight-wise,

The Body of Our Lord

Slipped through the stone-bound sepulchre,

Streamed through the soldier’s sword.

Though stripped and whipped and spat upon,

Sundered with nail and spear,

Thus did our dust in Him prevail

At the robin-time of the year.

Albeit our interval under Earth

Must needs much longer last,

Let there be always ready the roll

Of drums and the trumpet blast.

With bones ablaze and flesh aflash

And hair set flying free,

So shall I come to you, loved ones,

So shall you come to me.

Resignation at Midnight

Sleep has already come to other eyes,

Dreams are not driftwood gathered in their thickets;

Nobody else is left without allies

To count the clock-ticks and applaud the crickets.

But self is self, assignment without appeal,

However restlessly one plays the part.

Out of another’s slumber my soul would steal

Home to its ache in this accustomed heart.

Something Within Me

Something within me is delighted

When a little quatrain is completed;

Something within me does not care.

I have a half desire to hear it recited,

And by a voice I love repeated:

And I have half a loathing for the whole affair.

Metaphysics in the Marketplace

I am fond of the beginning of a fact:

A potency in progress toward an act,

A sorrow getting set to be a sigh,

In a love-song the lurking lullaby;

Half a hymn and half a syncopated third,

The flutter of a fledgling on its way to be a bird,

The murmur of a whisper on its way to be a word.

Likewise, I like the respite and the pause,

The suspense in a sentence, the comma in a clause,

The little will-be where there was a was.

Lastly, my predilection for an ending,

When existence in pretense has stopped pretending:

The infant’s second innings in the old,

Survival of the glitter in the gold;

I love a story when a story’s told, -

And the muffle of a bell,

And the echo in a well,

And the open gate of Heaven and the slammed door of Hell.

After This Our Exile

It’s just as dreary out in South Dakota,

It’s just as tiresome down in Tennessee;

New habitats don’t help us one iota -

Take it from me!

Nor does it matter if or whom one marries,

Despite what’s written in romance and rhyme.

Helen, you know, was bored to death with Paris,

After a time.

Our set-up is a permanent nostalgia,

Our peace apportioned to another scene.

Life is a pain without or with neuralgia,

At sixty or sixteen.

If there were any other hope but Heaven,

If joy could flint from any other spark,

Think you, my loved ones, for a moment even,

I’d keep you in the dark?

Love is a Loyalty

They left no literature of their love,

Rosie and Harry;

He had a pedlar’s cart to shove,

She had a wash to carry.

Valentines, verses, and billets doux

They were unaware of.

Drudgery, more than a dream come true,

They had their share of.

In separate roamings an unseen rope -

In wet and dry weather -

Some fibrous fidelity, hempen hope

Bound them together.

That they were childless, God willed to be,

Though gossips were ruthless;

But you can ask Abraham Blum, M.D.

If this be truthless.

Through tittle and tattle and tenement talkings,

Through shadow and shame,

She cooked his cabbage, and washed his stockings,

And bore his name.

Not much of a marriage to tell of this is,

For better or worse;

But surely some sort of a Mr. and Mrs.,

In a sort of a verse.

The Way of the Cross

Along the dark aisles

Of a chapel dim,

The little lame girl

Drags her withered limb.

And all alone she searches

The shadows on the walls,

To find the three pictures

Where Jesus falls.

Sister Jeremy

There was once a young nun with a truth-troubled face,

And a will like a whirlwind ungeared of its whirl,

Who survived the election and blinding of Grace

With the grace of a girl.

And they gave her a cross, and they gave her a ring,

And they lengthened her dress and unlengthened her hair;

And they said: “Now, my lady, you’re ready to sing

Any song that you care!”

But the process that proved her was rather precise,

And her surplus of feathers they sheared from the dove

Who was bound on a flight through a forest of ice

With no warmth but her love.

And her story, electrotyped, printed and bound,

And dispensed in the shops of aesthetic regard,

Is the one you will find in most convents around,

If you look very hard.

Aunt Abigail

Oh, once I was a debutante

And wore a social curl.

Now I am someone’s aged aunt,

No longer like a girl;

No longer like the rose in spring

They said I once resembled.

I find it hard as anything

To get myself assembled.

I don’t know what o’clock it is

Or if I’m late for tea.

I can’t find where the pocket is

In which I keep my key.

I think I’m late for supper too,

My lettuce and cold lamb.

I’d yawn if it were proper to,

To show how old I am.

I think my mind is wandering,

I think my head is through

With puzzling and with pondering

What am I next to do;

I wear a bonnet on it

So I’ll still know where it is,

And the little flower upon it

Is to throw you all a kiss.

The Devil’s Man

God the Father made sleep, and God the Son the vigil;

But the Devil made insomnia.

God the Father made food, and God the Son fasting;

But the Devil made dyspepsia.

God the Father made speech, and God the Son silence;

But the Devil made sullenness.

God the Father made love, and God the Son chastity;

But the Devil made coldness.

God’s man is the Father’s and Son’s, beloved of the Holy Ghost. If he does not sleep, eat, talk or love as much as he might, it is because he is waiting for a Kingdom that is not of this world.

The Devil’s man is a sullen dyspeptic, a sleepless misogynist. He does not need to wait for Hell. He is already in it.

To an Infant

Marcia was lent us to illustrate

How little was God when His love was great,

When flesh disguised the Divinity

In millimeter and milligram

And showed the size of Infinity

To the ox and the ass and the lamb.

St. Joseph’s Christmas

Not envied, not desired,

Only admired: -

A girl on this will thrive

As on no thing alive.

And such was God’s rare plan

For Mary’s man.

He watched his loved one flower

Hour after hour,

With footstep caused no fear

In angel-anxious ear,

Gave her his husband’s praise

In nought but gaze:

The exquisite adulation

Of contemplation

That lets a fact reveal

Itself as real,

And, in Our Lady’s case,

As full of grace.

He must have marveled most

When of the Holy Ghost

Her little Son who shivered,

At dawn was delivered.

He must have feared and feared

And hid behind his beard

When what was not his life

He welcomed from his wife

And his bride’s Babe and Lord

Adored and adored.

At Christ’s Nativity,

St. Joseph, I love thee.

Warning to Contemplatives

The soul can overburdened be