A Letter to Saint Braulio of Saragossa (585-651 AD, feast day March 26
Hey Brau, hey. Today’s clouds look like the froth of a vanilla ice cream soda, something you never ate, something you’d never say. They churn like the labor market.
You faced a rising threat of Gothic barbarism. Same.
The sword and fire and various punishments. Insults of the disobedient and barbs of wicked tongues.
Then again, you never had to step around a food delivery robot. Taking takeout somewhere, taking someone’s gig.
A headline inveighs, Stay where you are. Hug the jobs. Even in the face of limited advancement. Even in the face of feeling disengaged. Even if it necessitates garments rough and plain, food simple, life austere.
What cute new terms arose and lived and died in your age?
You aided your mentor Isidore in assembling his Etymologiae by hand, sans slop generators.
When your brother Frominian tried to resign his office as abbot, you wrote him back: “There is not a single occupation that is without its dangers […] You must stick by the work entrusted to you and the task you have undertaken. You must hate the sins, not the people. Even though tribulation brings us more than we can endure, let us not be afraid as if we were resisting with our own strength.”
On some level, I must believe the constancy of my worry does something for the world, a full-time job I perform for free.
Would Frominian today be replaced with a chatbot?
Reading the news feels like drinking poison, but who will guard against wolves if the shepherd does not watch? Who will drive away the robber if the watchman sleeps?
I await your answer here at this desk I may never leave.
The silence is unreal.
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A Letter to Saint Augusta of Treviso (≈ between 401-500 AD, feast day March 27
Patti Smith told Rolling Stone she jerked off to the Bible. A woman of great original genius! Were you?
Did the world feel like a shocking carnival of unaccountable power when you were alive, too?
What if warlords traded their armor for flowers?
Hey, sorry about what your dad did to you.
A virgin murdered in the middle of the 5th century, you never felt a lace garter clinging to your thigh.
I picture you like a baby deer at a salt lick, the hunter stalking up behind.
A pagan chief, when he found you praying to Christ he threw you in a cell, then knocked out all your teeth.
I see this taking place at night, the stars boiling up there in their cauldron of sky. The quiet face of the moon. The Angel of Death flapping his tireless wings.
A bad president is the abusive dad of the nation. Self-satisfied brutality and wild ultimatums.
With his sword your father tortured and decapitated you. He was the Teutonic duke of Friuli and nobody stepped in.
How did that sign at the protest go? The biggest dumbass on earth and the President of the United States should be two separate people? Something like that.
Supposedly Oscar Wilde said, “After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relatives,” but I don’t know.
Why doesn’t anybody ever stop the dads? Asking 4 real, so remember to write back.
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A Letter to Saint Akelda of Middleham (died 800 AD, feast day March 28)
No offense, but did you know you share a feast day with like 16 other saints?
All the information in the world won’t save me. Everything passes from living memory.
Your Wikipedia page states that you were “ostensibly an Anglo-Saxon princess of whom almost nothing is known and whose existence has been questioned.”
I don’t want to live inside a browser.
We can safely assume you never drank coffee with cream and sugar from a Styrofoam cup.
You never felt the cold metal zipper of your dress in your armpit.
Never ate pizza off a paper plate soaked through with grease.
You were strangled by Viking women during a Danish raid. Sisterhood still is not a given these days. (Amy Coney Barrett, I am looking your way).
They say you were a nun.
Not gonna lie, I like to play around with what I can make myself believe. Try to laugh at the madness rather than being overcome.
You might have watched blackbirds hopping in the mud and wondered what God had planned for them.
Might have longed for the return of leaves to the skeletonized trees of autumn.
Almost certainly you sang.
Too many people want history to be a theme park, and I try not to be one of them.
Some days the sun bites into the flank of day like a gold incisor. Did you sense your death coming?
Whenever someone tells me, “Don’t be afraid,” I get more afraid.
In Yorkshire, a holy well near your place of death is reported to have healing properties.
Picturing princesses from your era, I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” — the part where “Bernice winced as Marjorie tossed her own hair over her shoulders and began to twist it slowly into two long blond braids until in her cream-colored negligée she looked like a delicate painting of some Saxon princess. Fascinated, Bernice watched the braids grow. Heavy and luxurious they were, moving under the supple fingers like restive snakes.”
I bet the water is as cold as the glaciers that might have seemed no more than legends in your age, white lanterns aglow.
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Kathleen Rooney on the artwork: “I drew these with black Uniball Vision Elite Pen and Piochoo Dual Tip Brush Pens on Crehatos Spiral Bound Sketch Paper.”