The dark is shattered
With wild, new fear;
An ass’s feet stumbling
Is the sound that I hear.

The night is brighter
Then day should be;
A strange star’s splendor
Is the light that I see.

And above the terror
Of earth and sky
I can hear,if I listen,
A young child’s cry;

I can see, if I look,
Legions of wings,
And a woman who ponders
Of all these things.

a poem by Sister M. Madeleva

People who knew her, knew her as a teacher, a dutiful sister of the Holy Cross who taught at Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden and Saint Mary of the Wasatch near Salt Lake City. She shopped at O.P. Skaggs, walked the foothills with her various walking canes and shyly kept to herself.

But as far as nuns can be said to have a secret life, Sister M. Madeleva Wolff C.S.C. had one. She wrote poetry. Not the way you and I write poetry, but the way Emily Dickinson wrote poetry. She was a graduate of Berkeley and studied at Oxford. Her circle of personal friends and admirers ran from Edith Wharton (“The Age of Innocence”) to C.S. Lewis (“The Narnia Chronicles”). Joyce Kilmer (who wrote the poem “Trees”) visited her several times in Utah, and Bernard DeVoto – perhaps Utah’s most distinguished man of letters – poured his soul out to her in long, lush private letters.In the world of world literature, Sister Madeleva was a player.  –The Deseret News  the first news organization and the longest continuously-operating business in the state of Utah.