An invitation to reflect on two loaded images that I encountered at the Seven Fountains Jesuit center in Chiang Mai, Thailand this past fall, and which ministered to me there. If you’re on a phone, this poem will display better in landscape mode.
Outside the window
there stands a wounded tree.
Its bark looks burned
but there has been no flame.
It is stained with the blood
of a great gash in its side,
mostly healed into a
swollen ring, but the heart
oozes still, black
sap trickling down its side,
where insects feed on the
ever-bleeding wound.
In the
distance,
a fountain
stands before
an open chapel.
Its cleansing flow
pours from a clay jar
down a hill of stone
to fill a pool stirring
with life from some
ever-beating heart
within the stone.