this baptismal rosary’s intended
to be wound about the fingers at death
yet I found small kids had tormented
the snapped beads with which my hands are weft
both palms hide a lifetime’s vivisection
where whole decades are missing and mysteries
of the joys triumphs and afflictions
of that mother and son’s history
and all my vows- have been discontinued:
the share cherubs left me in Calvary’s
broken cross cannot now be renewed
from one Our Father and eight Hail Maries
babes unpicked the thread which bones hang onto
this chain’s smashed hereafter and hereunto
Blackwells
Oxford
18 June 2018
I was given a pair of crystal rosary beads by my mother’s cousin at my baptism in December 1961. This was at a church, which used to exist, called St Vigilius’ in Balclutha, South Otago.
Decades are groups of the ten Hail Maries to be said. It is pronounced to rhyme with ” checkered” not ” cascade”. There are Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries to be contemplated from the life of Christ with his mother. The ” invention” of the Rosary is usually attributed to St Dominic de Guzman O.P. ( 1170 - 1221), but this is false. The Middle English text of the early 13th century, the Ancrene Wise, already refers to it as an established mode of prayer. The Carthusian Dominic of Prussia gave the Rosary its modern form at the Trier Charterhouse in 1458.