A writer in Merion, Pennsylvania, Sister Renee Yann is featured in our National Poetry Month series with “A Long Faith,” a poem she loves. Sister Renee recalls that it came out of “a peaceful prayer” she experienced several Septembers ago. “I was young, but not as young as I had been! And I realized that the years had blessed me with a deep and comfortable relationship with God.”
“I Will Remember You” was inspired after enjoying “a solitary retreat in the Ozark woods,” she said. “There had been a violent lightning storm the night before, loudly raining down hail on my corrugated tin hermitage. But the storm ushered in a beautiful peace the next day that settled in my spirit and drew out this poem.” Sister Renee also writes the blog Lavish Mercy.
A Long Faith
By Sister Renee Yann
Click here to listen to the author read this poem
This is the way of love, perhaps
near the late summer,
when the fruit is full
and the air is still and warm,
when the passion of lovers
no longer rests against
the easy trigger
of adolescent spring,
but lumbers in the drowsy silence
where the bees hum—
where it is enough
to reach across the grass
and touch each other’s hand.
I Will Remember
By Sister Renee Yann
Click here to listen to the author read this poem
In another place, where life’s demands are rude,
and time is spinning faster than my soul,
I will remember You in this green wood,
when spirit, will, desire, love were whole.
I will remember your sweet hand in saffron glove,
reaching through flaxen sunlit trees.
I will remember the suggestion of your love,
humming promises to me like golden bees;
how sun dipped lower, lower to the earth,
lifting to its cheek the auburn sod;
how in a moment, like a splendent birth,
I was transported to the Face of God.
When this lucid hour of love is through,
Dusk is the way I will remember You.