When I Hear My Daughter’s Voice on the Radio


When I hear my daughter’s voice on the radio, clear and light
and true, I think of St. Clare, who is the patron saint of broadcasting, 
because once when she was ill and couldn’t leave the monastery, 
she saw faint, ghostly images of the mass flickering on the wall 
of her cell.  The raising of the cup.  The pious villagers, looking up.  
She is the patron saint of absence.  Of distance.   In Assisi once 

I saw what they claimed was her ash blonde hair, great, thick curls 
of it, heaped in a glass box with a golden lid, and I see no reason
this couldn’t be true, this couldn’t be hers, across all the centuries.  
We saw the shoes of St. Francis, too, tiny, like slippers, stained 
with blood, and the coarse brown habit he wore, and on the mountain,
in a cave, the narrow shelf where he slept, curled up like a baby.

There’s no telling what it is possible for us to feel.  I think of the day 
Maggie and I were walking by the track at the middle school— 
she was four—and before I knew it she was running.  She had decided 
to take off.  When I looked up I saw her in the distance, rounding 
the curve, her little arms pumping, her wispy hair floating behind her.  
As if she was really going somewhere.  As if she would ever return.

-first published in Pleiades