2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

the prose, the lyrical movement of the words. In all of his writing one is
struck by the spiritual. He never strays from who he was, the man who
had, as a boy in San Diego, been enamored by religious saints, and at
Mora the devotion of his teaching nuns inspired the longing to give his
life eventually to the Franciscan mendicant order. He wrote this poem a
few years after his ordination.
I Vowed
I vowed that I would not possess
Things having bulk of earthly dross,
Because my Lord in emptiness
Lay in the crib and on the cross.
The Lord was pleased, for He has blessed
My body’s poorness and my soul’s –
Behold the treasures that He pressed
Into my hands are little holes.
One poem, titled “Pena Blanca,” tells a story of this town- the town
he first traveled to after ordination as a priest. A poem caught my attention
in the book titled Morning. “The morning is with me ever, a book I
carry next to my heart: Noon but ushers its last part, Night is the dark,
rich cover.”
Who did that remind me of I was soon thinking of another poet, a
professor at the community college named Joan Logghe. She too felt a
deep love for New Mexico; her several books of prose were also
metaphors and images of the desert landscape. They speak of the solitude
of the rural New Mexican. I then thought that the two had much in
common, in their sacred bonding with place. Having been a transplant
myself, I knew I wanted to write about two people who, divided by one
generation, embodied a fierce devotion to their community, describing
the relationships with neighbors and friends in a similar, mystical, faith
driven way. Logghe is a well known teacher, a married wife and mother;
Fray Angelico, the priest-historian, whose love of the saint whose austere
rules were sanctioned by Pope Honorius the III humbled and defined
him; both were poets schooled with the discipline acquired from loving
138 Santa Fe Literary Review