A symbolist, somewhat surrealistic poem |
(The following doesn't promote anti-abortion sentiments but protests orthodox Christianity's 'abortion' of a legend about Yeshua's marriage to / child by Mary Magdalene while commemorating statues of The Black Madonna) I had an affair with the Virgin Mary and left her that way, legs crossed - emblematic of a killing tree - haunting our footsteps into the shadows guarding The Palace of Dreams, her hands reaching for the fabric, the texture of dawn, clutching, milking the teats of mother goats on the empty hills, the sun scorching her hair into threads of black beneath the nexus of crossed darkness, “My name is Mary, What does it mean?” she asked, “Peace, I think,” I said, “I feel the hunger of the waiting many reaching through his arms, their pain through his hands and feet - do they know what they want?” “Peace, hope, a chance to live and love a little,” I responded, “Yes, so speaks my heart” - she fixed me with her eyes, and mine followed her steps back through the goats, bending to wrench wormwood from the soil, her lips caressing its liquid essence for a heroic, hallucinogenic spinning of fantastic myths and tales swirling around his head, “They were cruel, not allowing us the baby we so wanted, Yet, the sand so accepting of his feet before They raised him up” - her whisper dissolved in her moment of transfiguration, etched in stone, black image on distant, rolling plains, At loss for words I stroked her marble hair and face - as cool or warm as the touch of my grieving hands, while unheeding, a parade of monarchs, nobility and soldiers marched past in the full regalia of war, peasants quietly bent beneath their toil in fields of waving grain, struck heat-tortured sparks from anvils with hammers of iron, Ecclesiastical judgements denounced her as unrighteous, ridiculed her wisdom, while grandmothers, mothers and daughters came in secret to worship Mother Mary, Goddess Earth, The Black Madonna before her stone-armed cradle as empires, states, dictatorships and democracies rose and fell around her watch beneath my caresses, until I turned back through the goats, afraid to wrench wormwood from between the rocks as she once had, heart heavy for the moment of his sorrow, pondering silly answers seemingly without reasoned questions, remembering the one I’d loved and left a virgin in the stone-embraced emptiness of her heart for the Child they wouldn’t let us have. Still, her eyes look across the distant plains, caressing the silence of the air with the meanings of her names: Peace, love, hope, The Black Madonna and my once and still-loved Mary Magdalene. |