Three Poems For Flannery O'Connor's 100th Birthday—Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

March 25,2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor. In honor of O’Connor’s work and memory, we have invited Angela Alaimo O’Donnell to share a few poems from her book Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery along with one new poem “Flannery’s Birthday.”

Flannery’s Birthday

by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

“Well I thanks you for my birthday message.
I am thirty-five years old and still have all my teeth.”

—Flannery O’Connor, Letter to Betty Hester, April 2, 1960

Little did I know, I’d have just four more.
Birthdays never meant that much to me
until I stopped having them. Now they seem
a sweetness every humanoid should savor,
a day for cake and contrition for all
the things you done and didn’t get to 
and might not ever, given the call
we all get but really don’t expect to
out of this party we call life. The knife
I use to cut my cake is sharp. Like my
eye and my pen. My stories rife
with folks who need a light to see themselves by.
Maybe candlelight is best, a birthday song
reminding us all we won’t be here long. 

---

Flannery & the Dragon

by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

“St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote:

'‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’

No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell.”

–Flannery O’Connor

The dragon shows up daily at my desk,
rears his hot head and breathes his hot breath
all over the keys of my typewriter,
singeing the page, the space bar warm to the touch.
I don’t mind him.  I don’t even ask
“Why me?” anymore.  My muse is death
dressed in rage and fire, hungry for human
fools.  And I’ve got a million of ‘em.
The lives I save are all my own.  They’re
dear to me as children.  So much
of my love spent on invention.
He waits, impatient, as they each walk past,
the blind and the lame, the deaf and the dumb.
It pains me to lose even one. 

Flannery’s Fire

by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

“The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”

--Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

That’s the beauty of it, living here
where the sun comes daily and the trees seem
lit from within, some secret fire
igniting the world which sparks but does not flame.
The same fire’s inside me, so I know
what it is to burn low with no
one seeing the quiet glory
you are, how bright your leaves and every
polished stem just gleaming in the white light,
what it means to be mean and still lovely
and loved by the maker who made you that way
full of wonderlust and mad hot wit.
It’s not something you see every day
unless you live here. So I stay. 

---

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City, and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. In addition, O’Donnell has published a memoir about caring for her dying mother, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell; a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy; and a biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Her ground-breaking critical book on Flannery O’Connor Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, America, The Bedford Introduction to Literature (anthology), Christian Century, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 (anthology), Christianity & Literature, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (anthology), Flannery O’Connor Review, Italian Americana, Italian Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Mezzo Cammin, Peacock Journal, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Taking Root in the Heart (anthology), among others. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024.