Monday, August 3, 2009

To My Own Mary of Magdala

What are you trying to say?

Your words are difficult and
Fragile as a painted eggshell.

This is not the news I want to hear.
This is not the news I want to bear.

You destroyed forever all I hoped would be
Sending softly leaded nightmares
In the middle of the dawn.

We walked the warming days
Shared in your imperfect vision
Through tears and peers into perdition
You pulled me through the darkness
To follow the sun unsetting.
It really wasn't our decision.

Now the sun is years and lives away
I turned and looked
You didn't stay

Sometimes you infuriate me
With your joy and with your riches
With your closeness to the secret
With your liveliness

Wrapped inside a thickly woven cloak made just for you.

How will I forgive your happiness?

No, I don’t want what I cannot hold.
No, don’t send me down the road.

What are you trying to say?

Go, and go which way?
Go, and go to whom?

Leave me in my room
Head turned down, body shrunk
Wishing, witless, that I never saw you grieving
That I never listened to your still demanding
Or invented some offense
That could have kept myself from you for shame.

Here I’m writing words like these
While standing on my knees
And I don’t know what I’m trying to say
Leaving letters along the way.

And I don’t know what I’m going to do.
See -- the sun, it follows you!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Time is required for an egg to be laid, prior to painting. Words can be the same. Take the time to paint well with words. Only then, meaning can be found.

Anthony Zuba said...

You could say I laid an egg with this poem....

I speculate that Mary of Magdala was viewed with envy by male leaders of the early Church for being the one who first saw the risen Jesus. I think she understood first and understood best what happened. She had an authority all her own and was a leader of the Church in her own right. Resentment over Mary and her privileged position and a misreading of the Gospels caused the Church to transform Mary from a leading disciple into a penitent sinner.

As the Church treated Mary of Magdala, so sometimes do each of us treat dear friends who bring us provocative words of wisdom and life. We are not grateful for the ways they challenge us to live to the fullest. We do not appreciate them for who they are; we want them only for ourselves. This is "vanity and vexation of spirit."

Anonymous said...

But what is the underlying cause for the vanity and vexation of spirit? What fuels it, and where does it originate?

Anthony Zuba said...

Call it a tragic flaw, call it original sin, call it human nature. Whatever "it" is, I accept it as a non-rational given, I am convinced of it, and therefore I seek to describe it rather than explain it.

How would you answer your own questions?

Anonymous said...

I don't think so. Why create beings with a built in tragic flaw? Entertainment? No. There is a purpose to that which you write of, even if you do not yet know it.

Anthony Zuba said...

I was only putting out some options. Me, I lean toward original sin, which, though the cause of many a tragedy, is quite different from an essential tragic flaw. I'm not a fatalist, and I don't believe in fate. Creation was, and is, very good, and so are human beings. All will be well. And yet, for now, something is not right.

"There is a purpose to that which you write of, even if you do not yet know it." You are so cryptic, Anonymous.