Her Passion
Thinking about Michelangelo's Pieta
If Mary could raise her marble-lidded eyes,
look up from her son's stilled face
and catch our distant gaze;
if she could coax some circulation
into the crook of her arm
where the slump of his shoulders
has set like a bow in the clouds
of her sculptured gown and flex her fingers
stiff with loss to beckon us;
if she could ease the weight of death
draped in stone across her breast to draw us in
and, raising his head, turn it aside from her
aching vigil to speak of her stigmata
the silver barcode of maternity
stretch-marked across her belly
what would she say to us, we mothers of sons
hell bent on challenging authority
and changing the world?
Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
Elizabeth Brooke-Carr is a Dunedin-based poet, novelist & friend.
Her Passion was first published as Monday's Poem in the Otago Daily Times, 2009
(Thank you, Ms Liz - x)
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This is an open invitation to all bloggers & poets to post a poem on Tuesdays. In the words of Mary McCallum, who started the ball rolling, 'This is the blogosphere's equivalent of an open-mic night - as stimulating and as fun!'
If you'd like to join in, please leave a comment on any of the participating bloggers' sites; that way we can add links to your poem?
So far we have poets contributing from NZ and the US; if I've done my sums right, our Northern/Southern hemisphere span means that between us we have a 37 hr day. This implies that poems from here, there and everywhere have more time than usual to arrive! I love the idea of Roomy Tuesdays -
