The Lesson {poetry for lent}

Over the next few days, I'm going to share three poems by Thom Satterlee. A novelist, poet, and translator, Thom is also a friend and fellow parishioner. In most of the poems in the collection Burning Wyclif, Satterlee imagines scenes from the life of John Wyclif, the fourteenth century scholar best known for inspiring the first complete translation of the Latin Bible into English.  A renowned Oxford scholar, Wyclif lived through the Black Plague, a Papal Schism, and the Peasant's Revolt. The "morning star of the Reformation," Wyclif was an early critic of the Roman Catholic Church. Embroiled in church controversies, he was condemned by the Pope as well as the Archbishop.

Thirty years after his death, the Council of Constance declared Wyclif a heretic, and ordered that his body be exhumed and his remains buried.

The collection Burning Wyclif begs to be read in one sitting.  The poems move chronologically through Wyclif's life and as I read them, the drama, character, and tension drew me in. Themes of death and the relationship between the living and the dead run through the book.

This first poem I'm sharing imagines Wyclif and an early brush with brokenness.


The Lesson
by Thom Satterlee

Once, as a boy, Wyclif carried a lamb
on his shoulders. Its legs dangled
across his chest, its head bobbed above his head.

He walked with it held high through the flock
as clouds gathered, darkened. At first
the rain felt good -- slow, fat drops splashing

cold against his skin while the underside
of the lamb warmed his neck. He rubbed
his face against its fine new wool.

But when thunder cracked and the sheep bolted,
the boy ran, too, tripped to one side and fell
with his whole weight on top of the lamb.

The sound of its leg when it snapped
was an echo of thunder, a noise
that entered his ear and never left,

not that long day with all its lessons,
beginning with the knife his father taught him
to run under the lamb's neck, down to its belly,

and then with his own hands to remove
the word of every organ, repeating their names
as his father patiently spoke them --

heart, kidney, liver, lung -- or later
when the family ate stew and the boy learned
how to laugh at jokes told at his expense,

then and years later the one lesson
that remained was a bone breaking
inside his ear, the aftersound of its splintering.


First published in the Anglican Theological Review.

an explanation of {poetry for lent}