Old Habits

You’d wonder now where all those saints have gone,
Those cowling round our calamitous days,
Broadest-backed for the narrowing of hope-
The widest shoulders to lean worlds upon;
All frantic, fretted, our unholy frays
That haled them, incensed, off the walls to cope

Fine, coarse, familiar habits, soutaned, veiled,
Surpliced, sandaled, paled, visioned, you know how-
Are we undone-now are the champions fled ?
O that those soaring Josephs up the nave,
Those sudden Gabriels might blaze the now
Of need-those Anthonys might find their bread ! Now, how it sounds we’re
talking in thin air
Or to ourselves-as if they weren’t all there !

Tom P. MacGloin