by Richard Greene
Young farmer, anointed with oils, hands laid on
And priested,
Never quite my friend though his spell tugged me
And held me at arm?s length as I held him.
A head full of books at nineteen,
His conversation was hogs,
Their cleanliness, their intelligence,
And the slanders against them.
He would hang his leg over the arm of a chair,
Sit half a day with a book in one hand
And a never-extinguished cigarette in the other:
He once told a dozen celibates that reading was sexual
But disappointing when the pages ran out.
Student, teacher, editor, he was a scatterer of papers,
his words covered floors through twenty years and three countries.
Too much mastered by his schtick, he made himself solitary
Until he found ?his people? in Annotto Bay,
A looped and windowed priest, farm-hand among farm-hands.
All this, of course, by report: I lost him long ago,
Though the years seem an eyelid closed and opened:
The boy with his book and his cigarette
And the man on the verandah,
His blood scattered around him like words.
— Martin Royackers, S.J., was murdered last year because of his work in a land cooperative in Canada.
