January 2024
Bio Note: I kept meeting Mary M in dreams in Jerusalem, she was always a begger, and I wondered what she was trying to tell me. First time was at Thanksgiving, and my mom said "She's not the Mary I know" which created another poem. "Twelve" is imagining how frustrating it is without language, after "Eleven" by Archibald MacLeish.
A Poem for Mary Magdalene
In Jerusalem, she sells me sandals. An old woman, eyes of tarnished brass.. My bracelets rattle as I count change. She waves me away saying “Poet— your words are the blood of soldiers and whores. Tears as payment to bathe the feet of angels.” I walk away barefoot, her voice chiding “Poet—you, too, are a whore.” Years later, I meet Mary again, on the same corner in Jerusalem. Lily of valley is growing in her coal black hair. Her eyes are sherry colored and fevered from years of knowing God. “Poet—“ she laughs, recognizing me. “Here is how you become a saint.” And taking my hand she opens her gown and puts my fingers inside her wound. “Touch my heart to see if it is gold or rust and then you will know what words have made me.” I walk the streets of Jerusalem, neither saint nor slut, begging for scraps of paper, pieces of bone. I touch my own ecstatic flesh, smear sweat and rust. Looking for an opening, a sacred hole to vanish into.
Twelve
And, as it happens, the mute child is not rebellious nor stupid, and of course it is winter. Autumn has rollicked its leaves tripped in dull joy all over itself. Wait for the power to know: sound out these garbled messages, the patois, the bird sounds that unleashed his rage against the hunched talkers, the gnarled walkers who should have stayed silent. The hoe as it turned over each writhing clump of philosopher, the tines of each rake as it breaks apart the grass. How long does it last? The astonished bell when it breaks apart its clapper. How many months can he swallow and burp this river of vowels into the air? He sucks each stoned consonant, sun-warm into his maw of nest like the birch branches he seeks in winter. His tongue is a blood-thick worm trying to bust into the ragged bone of molar. How he basks under such wild utterances. He knew, they all did, that this belching of sound would please them. And they would never think of each other the same way. Just as we had always known, he is a choice. He wasn’t able to waste breath the way the others above him had, the green puffs of leaves as they filter the sun. He watches a skylark overhead and practices out loud, because he wants to: “this is speech.” The silent shadow as their wings cross his feet—
©2024 Laurie Byro
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