When the old mystics described religious experiences
maybe it felt a little like this: simply overcome

as the bell rings ten, sore knees pressed into stone
in the cavernous church looking up to an icon.

Maybe it’s the thirty-eight-degree heat. Maybe
it’s the sorrowful absence of cat hair in my mouth.

Maybe it’s how Saint Genevieve saved a city
through her words. Maybe it’s how she reminds

me of my friends, of West Belfast, of Sister
Mona’s roses. A gilt figure in Paris lands

me somehow back to standing in a playground.
Sister Anne. Riley wallpapering her classroom

in book covers just to show the kids you can be hot
and clever. Niamh speaking tenderly to

and about the children. The army men who smothered
Mona’s roses with busted sandbags. How the roses

grew back. The ruins of those murdered rosebushes
nourished whatever was to grow above them.

All those girls who passed those roses every morning.
All this from the gaze of the patron saint of shepherds.

Maybe it’s not so profound. Maybe I’m just homesick
and you could fry an egg on these Parisian cobbles.

Or maybe it is. When my eyes dry, I get up from my knees
and take my devotions with me into the brightness.

Mícheál McCann is from Derry City. His first collection, Devotion (Gallery, 2024), was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes 2024 and listed as a Book of the Year by RTÉ and The Irish Times. His second collection, Lives of the Saints, is forthcoming with Gallery in 2026