YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

His name is better known now

         for rainbow flags, a Pope,

         and source of software code. Wear

                 a flower in your hair.

Assisi on the terraced contours

of Subasio. When Giovanni Bernardone

     was born there in 1182

        there were more trees,

     fewer domes and steeples,

       but the lapis lazuli sky

     blue as the Virgin’s mantle

           remains the same.

The dust devils still dervish-whirl

through orchard and vineyard in summer.

“Giovanni” was his mother’s idea,

          his father

who’d made his textile fortune in Provence

     wanted to call him

“the Frenchman”, Francesco

     or as we say

         Francis.

Our future Italian bodhisattva,

     (Namaste to the Deva

     that dwelt within him)

worldly-wise by his twenties, taking

     up the sword in war

between Ghibelline and Guelph

(he on the Papal side against Perugia) –

he wasn’t very good at soldiering

          captured
imprisoned in the city of his enemy

     where he first tasted

     loneliness, want, discomfort.

          He tried again

riding off in splendid armour

     to join Walter of Brienne.

He didn’t get further than Spoleto

          thirty miles away.

          His frailty felled him

     before the enemy had a chance to.

The rebellion against paternal authority

     is hardly new, an eternal

        verity.

The impetuous youth

     ran off and hid in a cave

     for a month like a bandit.

     When he returned

corpse pale, his finery in rags

the townsfolk, thinking him

     a demented beggar

     and fearing contagion

     threw clods of dirt at him.

Papa Bernardone must have nearly

had the patience of Francis’ Heavenly Father,

     took back

his prodigal, though fearing

for his son’s sanity, chained him in

     a secret room.

          The shame.

Well, you know what they say

     about Italian men

and their mothers’ apron strings…

Mama Bernardone conspired

with a priest to get Francis into hiding.

          By then

          Frankie

     had discovered

          that poverty

          and Jesus

          made him

          light up

    like a Christmas tree.

He still had some of his father’s money

giving it away in the name of the Church.

At some point Papa had enough

          and cut him off,

such is the way when a son,

drunk on frightening ideals

     and the Oedipal spring

goes off on his own path, though

denouncing your flesh and blood

          to the Bishop

seems a bridge too far.

And then the famous scene,

     the deliberate

    imitatio Christi.

                                    Francis

goes before the judge.    

                                                 You will

have seen the fresco in the Basilica, yes?

     By Giotto’s hand.

     In front of the judge

he sheds his lavish clothes in the name of God

     this proto-Marxist

     and dons sackcloth

with a length of rope slung around his waist.

          From there

     he was off to embrace lepers.

           You remember

Princess Diana hugging people with AIDS?

          It was like that.

     He made them human.

          As for the rest

     the vision of the crucified

     Christ floating above him

          like a Jesus kite

     tethered to his stigmata,

or all the Dr Doolittle stuff,

the Brother Sun and Sister Moon…

          I don’t know.

     I sometimes wonder if

     when he was famous

     he buried the hatchet with Dad.

If so

     it must have been awkward

          on those visits

at the family dinner table

          crunching on the bones of the

          sparrows he’d been

preaching the Gospel to the day before.