Mary

In Renaissance paintings she holds the child
like a porcelain doll. She sits surrounded
by animals and men, having given birth
in a stable, and she isn’t the least
afraid. Sometimes artists build strange worlds
of meticulous Technicolor order.

She did not ask for this. She did not demand
that her statue mark every cathedral door
like cartoon faces on neon signs
outside chain restaurants. She had
in youth a mind of her own, a face of her own,
until an angel tossed pebbles at her window.

Now her name means nothing more than “mother.”
It has lost its ancient thunder, the roar of the seas.
She is the low lullaby that followed
the howl of parturition that, wondrous, followed
the veiled silence of virginity.
What is left but the slow moan of grief?

No, nothing more than a marbled pietà,
the pierced and broken body of the son
draped across her arms, because the need
to carry never ends. Underneath
his wilted flesh, her bloodied robe, there rises
the breath she gave him once. And will again.