It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible.

—Adam Phillips

i.

She worried.
& she knew.

Good enough
makes a faint halo.

Still she was good enough.
She let the infant dream

his unbroken body
at her nipple.

She suckled him &
waited as lightning struck.

Often. His eyes clouded—
ultramarine, gray violet.

His work would come
soon enough, until then….

She watched when he
clambered to the roof

to shoot ravens, then heal them
with a smudged finger touch.

 

ii.

At seventeen Jesus was six foot two
up on the roof, praying under a sky of fire—

He touched that girl who was long paralyzed.
They swam as one.

Time bore them on its back.
Air shuddered.

Down on his father’s plain,
the Jordan burst its banks.

The Philistines got twitchy,
kicked him arse-first onto Rome’s old road.

Try Damascus. Don’t breathe
your Love round us….

 

iii.

Mad old Mary, violet-eyed, stares through them.
Every day….Walks through them….

Until they turn into a greeny livid air.
Love’s naysayers, greedy men,

become less than a festering
wasp worry. Vexatious nothings.

She sits each night alone,
and her son long dead,

combing the dry wings from her hair,
her mouth spilling wild honey.