St. Fabiola

St. Fabiola, 60" x 35,” Oil on Panel, by Melissa Carmon

ST FABIOLA

St. Fabiola
at Easter time
In the greyness between night
and a yellow morning
your mourning fresh
with swift decision your
life was remade

The earth fell away
beneath your turning
with a crack,
a Roman column
swerved and with a colossal sound
that left our ears ringing
splintered stone shards
on the ground

Oh my glory, 
Oh my glory, 
It was as nothing

O Fabiola, the world was not prepared
for the greatness of your heart

Perhaps it is forgivable
when a little one wishes
for a royal name and
a river of riches
fine silks and linens
and dresses and gardens
and parties and servants
the intrigue, the politics
and later, power

That column of dust
That column of stone 
That column of ashes  

We heard nothing, 
except of your repentance—
and then— 
with a swooping sure glide,
you dove, headlong 

Was it the grinding of
your heart to ribbons
that carved the wells of compassion
What had happened to your hands
that mercy poured forth
for the human animal,  Imago Dei,
with a broken limb
still dragging behind it
the snare

For the ignorant nameless, 
the fresh wounds of the faceless,
the abandoned, the homeless,
the vulnerable traveler

St. Fabiola guide us
and to a life of freedom from all that binds us, 
St. Fabiola loose our binds.

Oh my daughters
Oh my daughters

They say
Many waters cannot
quench love
Nor the rivers drown it

Historical Background: Saint Fabiola (Born ? - 399 CE), was a member of the wealthy and powerful gens Fabia family.  Her first husband was so cruel that she was able to obtain a divorce, which was significant in Roman times.  She married again, but her second husband later died.  That Easter, she experienced a time of change in her life, and became a physician.  She expended her vast fortune caring for the sick, the destitute, and the dying, whom she personally served in the hospital she had built for them.  She also funded the building of monasteries in various places around the Mediterranean, traveled extensively, and kept correspondence with St. Jerome in Jerusalem.