COUNTING BONES

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.

Eddie Canales, director of South Texas Human Rights Center. Photograph: Gabriela Campos via The Guardian.

for john meza and eduardo canales

how many graves received them 

that is 

what was left of their bodies… 

for two days 

you will sift the soil 

with your hands and small trowels  

letting the earth 

fall away 

from the whiteness of bone 

i cannot fathom how you . . . 

(my heart aches with this almost thought) 

how will you touch the small remnants of lives 

and still breathe… 

how…

only by kneeling 

                                     

Author’s Note: John Meza is one of the volunteers working with Eddie Conales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center. With members of the Texas State University Forensic Pathology Department, they exhume bodies in graves in San Ygnacio, Texas to help identify missing migrants.

 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.” 

EXHUMATION OF RELICS, 2008

by Julie Steiner

“I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St John's grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will.” —Saint John Henry Newman, 1801-1890, canonized on 13 October 2019; the quotation is from “Written in Prospect of Death,”  Meditations and Devotions, Part 3, 1876). See also "“The Empty Tomb: Cardinal Newman's last laugh?” in Commonweal, October 8, 2008.  Photo: Ambrose St John (left) and Saint John Henry Newman.

A miracle, of sorts: an empty tomb—
a skeleton-less grave, though shared by two.
One hundred eighteen years should be too few
for bones and teeth to seep away like rheum.

The undertakers managed to exhume
two coffin handles; damp had rotted through
all else except a gold-thread tassel. Who
could tell which soggy humus went with whom?

Could Church officials separate the clay
of John from that of Ambrose? In a way,
the two became one flesh while six feet under.

Saint John’s been moved; St John stayed put, they say.
And yet the pair defiantly obey
“What God has joined, let no man put asunder.”


Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, and the Asses of Parnassus.