LEAF BY POET By Mary Rudge, O.P.L. When gingko leaves turn gold reminding us of Goethe's wonder at unity, leaf become two as one; perhaps mind of teacher and student twined, and maples all along the walk bum red with inner fire, the new semester starts. September is good time for learning, warming ourselves at our own fires burning, we'll stay in, open texts and study notes. Each new semester time, I passed him in the halls (said just "hello", or smiled), Dominican in black and white, hurried, as I, to waiting others. I thought again of all the notes- still have them, everything he said, in bic ink black on the white pages. How he started me in Theology, through all the poets. The Bells, by Poe, the Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson, reading Gerald Manley Hopkins, Wilde and Blake and Yeats and Everson, and the women poets. God's rhythms. Syphoned through human breath and brain. Each fall, through gingko and maples, coming anew, again, new class rooms, new teachers, each semester the black and white of it, we are as tree and branches. Science, anthropology, calculus, and logic, backbone and discipline, leaf and vein. I look again at Goethe and his poem, Think of you, teacher, reading, how the leaf divides, becomes two, or two minds join as one.
Gold Certificate TEACHING By Mary Rudge, O.P.L. Sister, you sat at your desk, I at mine. Across from me, you never knew my struggle, crisis of faith. I could not understand your beauty given only to God. Oh yes, I knew, that He should have you in eternity, have all of us, me too, whoever would stay worthy. But should He make such beauty, take for always, never sharing. Creating so ever between us there would be no passion, love; marriage, maybe forty, fifty years of joy, if lucky- going to God, together. He could willingly be with us, join us, for our time on earth, there could be children. But you, already consecrated, your chair, my chair, separate worlds. Every day in class your very presence, your robes, Dominican, gave me a lesson. Yes, I became Catholic. I had to know how you could be as you were, what you had learned, what you thought, so you taught, and never knew, even now will never know, how being there, you preached to me each day, without a word.