Good Friday (2010)

Magdalen’s Song

And what will happen to us
now that they have killed him?
Who will be there to tell us
never to bow, never to bend,
but to follow our star
out of our Gardens of Gethsemane?

We walked with him on the way,
but not to be free like this
with his mother, broken
when she saw his body
hanging from a tree,
digging her finger in the dirt,
as if by burying her tears,
she could bring him back from the dead?

And now there’s no one left
except her, the boy, and me—
the men deserted him to Romans
who knew I would have died beside him
when they held their swords to my throat,
and looked in my eyes and laughed,
not because they wouldn’t have killed me,
but they had known me before
as the woman with seven demons,
but now I was only a woman
looking up at a dead man--
black wings hovering behind the clouds.

***

From Dub Wise (Peepal Tree Press, September 2010)