Portrait of a Priest as a Young Boy

[Lorenzo]

By: Albert Cipriani



Back when my knuckles hadn’t yet emerged
like islands from my baby fat, nor facts
from dreams, and one-scoop ice-cream cones could serve
to satiate the deepest longings that
I could conceive of (my conception being
so near and puberty so far away),
they placed in my pink palm a cotton string.
I clutched it with both hands as if to pray
thanksgiving to the clown for that balloon,
that floating jewel of redness half my size,
that (once I took my eyes from it, resumed
my place beside my mother,) just as I
reached out to hold her hand, slipped from mine.
Since then, I’ve vowed to hold to what’s divine.


http://www.catholicplanet.com/poems/cipriani2.htm