THINKING ABOUT UNAMUNO’S San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

THINKING ABOUT UNAMUNO’S San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

THINKING ABOUT UNAMUNO’S San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

               San Manuel     the priest who kept
               his poor parish in the faith
               burnished their bright hope of heaven
               (hope is a thing with feathers)

it is best not to think these days
about what     what the newspapers report so reasonably
        (I lived in the first century of world wars,
        most days I was more or less insane)
today's weather     an endless rain of feathers

when the passenger pigeon     now extinct
had not yet been converted
to fashion     slaughtered      its plumage plucked
for the elegant hats of America's women
     (those catlike immaculate
           creatures for whom the world works)
when the migrating flocks still passed
overhead     a billion strong     the farmers said
bird lime turned the woods white
the sky was dark for a week

               And San Manuel? Late in the story we learn
               he did not believe in the hope
               he kept alive     believing as he did
               (like his author) in the sustaining power
               of fiction