Catholic Prayer: Seed Planting: Prayer to St. Isidore

Description:

This prayer will encourage a devotion to St. Isidore, the patron of workers in the soil.

Prayer:

The man to turn to when hands become calloused and the back aches and the cutworms wax thick and fat is St. Isidore, patron of workers in the soil. His plow is said to have been drawn by angels. Taping a statue to the handle of your hoe might help, but we haven't yet heard the whirr of cherubic wings alongside us. But it's nice to know there's someone who cares and is on our side against the Mexican bean beetle.

To St. Isidore

St. Isidore, St. Isidore,
To you we rogate, to you we implore:
Please let it (or not) shine or pour,
Bring on the bee, hold off the hoar;

Coax the oat, swell the meat
Of grape and nut;
encourage the wheat
To ripen fat in August heat
Then lay down, brown, for us to beat

And bag in burlap with quadruple X's
Haul to the mill with stone-ground reflexes,
Enliven the staff of both the sexes
By stuffing them full of B complexes;

Sweeten the soil's sour grievance.
Correct the mustard's feckles malfeasance,
Raise up the corn in rows of allegiance,
Bow down the cherry in fruitful obesiance;

O Guardian of squash and tendrilled pea,
Hoeing away at sanctity,
All ills of bud and vine and lea,
But mostly our garden, remedy.

Prayer Source: Family Liturgical Customs No. 4: Easter by Ethel Marbach, Abbey Press Publishing Division, St. Meinrad, Indiana, 1964