Night Was Afraid to Fall

POETRY BY FATHER ORLANDO ADDISON

I knew Father Orlando, and admired his poetry, while he was in the Diocese of Michigan. He is now in the Miami area, and parish priest to our dear friend Joy James Williams. It was Joy who sent me a copy of Father Orlando’s newly-published book, Night Was Afraid to Fall: Bilingual Poems. (English translations by M. Jane Roberts)

Although I do not speak or read Spanish, I have been exposed to it in liturgical settings often enough to appreciate its capacity to evoke strong emotion, even when the precise meaning is unclear. For about a year I have made a practice of reciting the Venite canticle in Spanish at Morning Prayer, because phrases like “en su mano estan las profundidades de la tierra” call me into the “deep places” in myself, which is where we ought to be when praying, right?

Father Orlando seems to share my fascination for the image of the sun setting over water. In the poem Aniquilamiento (ie.e “Extinction”) he writes:

Poco antes de enmudecerse el orbe

El sol retoca su cara en el mar

antes de besar los labios de la muerte.

Just before the earth grows silent

the sun freshens its face in the sea,

preparing to kiss the lips of death.

And, in Eternity, he writes:

When the day exhausts itself,

the Sun rests its body

in the sea.

It rests from the ardor of its cycle

after having scorched the grass,

after having chiseled its tracks

on the backs of laborers.

Eternity continued marching on

with envy burning in its breast

for not having, like the Sun,

rested in the water of the Bay.

I have no such melodious words to share at the moment, but the photo above, taken on Ontario’s Walpole Island, speaks from the profundidades of my own heart.