my lost saints

my lost saints

fiction
edward w pritchard

Not being Catholic or anything like that I don't know much about Saints, though always did I admire truly Saint Francis of Assisi from the Giotto painting " Renunciation of Saint Francis' Father", renunciation being intimately familiar to me having lost my best friend over money in a more round about gradual manner myself.

To me however my lost saints will always be The Beatles the big brothers I never had, the man about town I never was and over night success I never came to be, me wanting to be a writer and poet in the Lennon and McCartney tradition. Then came the revelations about Yoko and John's mean drunk drinking in NYC, Paul being mysteriously dead over and over on Album covers I listened to but never actually bought, George being a tad over the top with the mystical stuff, even for me an impractical egg headed dreamer, and finally after John's tragic death reality set in that my Saints had fallen and I was stuck facing a hostile world alone.

A few weeks ago I was commenting to a pretty young girl at the grocery check out, flirting a bit to her who was wearing a Beatles pin on her blouse, she who had been to see Paul perform in Cleveland recently that despite my admiration for the Lads none of them had ever called me, stopped to acknowledge my existence or even criticized my mentioning them in my mostly unread writings. The pretty young girl she just didn't understand where I was coming from.

So not unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning a fellow Poet who in Sonnet 43 " How do I love thee" wrote the best love poem since Shakespeare I now have lost my Saints [and loves] and my challenge is to find the divinity in myself as I come to realize  I am my lost Saint letting slip away my potential as the spark of divinity sacredly placed in myself once by unseen hands wanes with age as I sojourn alone trudging along seeking significance in the face and smile of a grandchild or troubles of one of my children.

Skyward this week did I gaze at a full moon 30 times brighter than usual next visible at this luminosity long after I be gone and forgotten, Venus lighting the coming interminable autumn night and as I hear it universes without end drifting further apart as time slowly grinds on. Me with the audacity to wish for significance in personal being and remembrance as a speck of matter once possessing a spark of insight into stone cold  Reality. I am my lost Saints. C'est dommage.