Martin Royackers

Martin Royackers

   Young farmer, anointed with oils, hands laid on
   and priested,
   never quite my friend though his spell tugged me and
   held me at arm's length as I held him.

   A head full of books at nineteen,
   his conversation was hogs,
   their cleanliness, their intelligence,
   and the slanders against them.

   He would hang his leg over the arm of a chair,
   sit half a day with a book in one hand
   and a never-extinguished cigarette in the other:
   he once told a dozen celibates that reading was sexual
   but disappointing when the pages ran out.

   Student, teacher editor, he was a scatterer of papers,
   his words covered floors through twenty years and three countries.
   Too much mastered by his jokes, he made himself solitary
   until he found "his people" in Jamaica,
   a ragged priest, farm-hand among farm hands.

   All this, of course, by report: I lost him long ago,
   though the years seem an eyelid closed and opened:
   the boy with his book and cigarette
   and the man on the verandah,
   his blood scattered about him like an ash.

Richard Greene www.stthomas.on.ca (Martin Royackers SJ was murdered in Jamaica June 20, 2001)

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