Mary's song
Blue
homespun and the bend of my breast
Keep
warm this small hot naked star
Fallen
to my arms. (Rest …
you
who have had so far
to
come.) Now nearness satisfies
the
body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a
universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not dosed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed
by doves' voices, the whisper of straw,
he
dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to
my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind
in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought
to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
Luci Shaw
from “A Widening Light Poems of the
Incarnation”
