Magnificat (a meditation for Mother’s Day)
Mother,
in sickness and in health
with a carpenter, traversed a fertile thousand miles.
Grace bid not her wonder through Jacob’s land
or tangle in the hairs of Norman’s beard,
but find herself an alien beneath the Midnight or the Memphis sun.
And was it in the fibers of her robe
or her chromosomes
that the blue ran out into her children’s eyes?
Every month she shed that blood which would one day wash
this wondrous world, these sordid crowds
and speak the words of God into a barren womb of world,
of clay.
She baked bread,
the bread of her mothers,
Anna, Sarah and Hagar,
for nine months baked and baked
to be broken
at a table. Set for twelve
years of schooling, or her child’s friends.
O pangs of love! O contractions of consubstantiation!
She gives her child to Eli,
the olive grove,
the reeds and rushes
of the Nile,
or the Willamette.
And when there is no more wine
she knows where it is
and she asks her child to fetch it
for she knows what time it is
better than that clock on the wall,
or the stomach of her suckling babe.
Every pain in the side aided
Every ache in the head soothed
Every scar bandaged
She says to them,
“Bear all things
with love,
and fish oil.”
In humility, in love, in a great rending of all things
whether tears of blood or joy of wine
she teaches me to be a bearer of God
And I, out into the great laugh of humankind, project:
“I felt the Spirit kick today.”
She raises her children to host
three strangers, a wedding feast, or a small gathering,
in a house with many rooms
and many beds
from which I rise, oft quite late, and too seldom,
to call her “Blessed.”
And in every holy, learned act I echo with her, “Let it be.”
And sometimes we talk
in some Bosnian town
or on the phone,
in Norse
or in beads
And she says I am her son
And she prays for me.
