Poet-Priest

Ernesto Cardenal was a poet/priest/revolutionary all combined in one man. Born in Nicaragua in 1925, he underwent a dramatic conversion at 31(my age, by the way) and entered a Trappist monastery where, incidentally, Thomas Merton became his mentor. Later in his life he took a major role in a post-revolutionary government. The following poem moved me...it seems to me almost identical to some of David's Psalms but in more modern terms.

Lord O Lord my God
why have you left me?
I am a caricature of a man
People think I am dirt
they mock me in all the papers

I am circled
there are tanks all around me
Machine-gunners have me in their sights
there is barbed wire about me
electrified wire
I am on a list
I am called all day
They have tattooed me
and marked me with a number
They have photographed me behind thh barbed wire
All my bones can be counted
as on an X-ray film.
They have stripped me of my identity
They have led me naked to the gas-chamber
They have shared out my clothes and my shoes
I call for morphine
and no one hears me
In my straitjacket I cry out
I scream all night in the mental home
in the terminal ward
in the fever hospital
in the geriatric ward
in an agony of sweat in the psychiatric clinic
In the oxygen tent I suffocate
I weep in the police cell
in the torture chamber
in the orphanage

I am contaminated with radioactivity
no one comes near me
for I am contagious

Yet
I shall tell my brothers and sisters
about You
I shall praise you in our nation
and my hymns will be heard
in a great generation
The poor will go to a banquet
and our people will give a great feast
the new people
yet to be born.