Beloved;

I do not need your touch-

But still I know it by the careful way you pack my bags

The third reminder to take my medicine 

The clink of the teacup against your teeth in the morning.

And you know mine by the mixed mumble of our prayers 

The way we sit apart in the evenings

The scratch of my pen as I write to you.

I gave up your touch, yes, but even so.

It is not a sin when they find us-

Our fingers locked together on your last night on Earth-

And pull us apart.

I am left finally with the Lord that gave us three decades together.

I must complete the last two alone

And glorify Him as the years pass like beads through my hands.

This is the mercy God extends to us in death;

When they exhume our grave, at last they cannot separate your bones from mine.

~c.m. hunsaker, Oct. 2019

October 9th is St. John Henry Newman’s feast day in the Catholic Church. A convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, Newman was something of a controversial figure, given the state of relations between Catholics and Anglicans at the time. But he made substantial contributions to both religions, and his mark is still felt today. Around the time of his canonization in 2019, there was a bit of a renewed fuss about Newman’s “potential homosexuality”. Newman insisted on being buried in the same grave as his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John, with whom he had lived for 32 years before St.John’s death in 1875. Some commentators feel that because Newman never acted on any attraction he may have had, that he was not gay. I for one take issue with that definition of homosexuality. All we know for sure is that the two men were reportedly inseparable in life, and also in death. When the Vatican exhumed Newman in 2010 as part of the canonization process, the remains were so decomposed that the two could not be separated. This poem is a response to that relationship.