Platyera
A tumult of seagulls haunts the strip mall on McFadden Avenue, ten miles too far from the sea. They wheel with scavengers’ grace past signs that read mail exchange, tattoo, tobacco, massage, peter’s gourmade burgers.
Yesterday stormwater pealed past this urban expanse. Now the streets are rain-stained and gleaming. The heavens burn cobalt, and clouds tower, stretch, push past the sun.
In the icon they call Platyera, Mary’s arms are outstretched, pulled wide, her hands open. The sleeves of her robe part like curtains. Her womb circles her heart.
Christ reigns there. His body grows.
The word platyera is Greek, drawn from Platyera ton ouronon: she who is more spacious than the heavens. Christ, who made the heavens and exceeds them, dwells in her womb, and she is not consumed but sustains him.
Gulls turn over the storm-damp strip mall, tracing wide circles in wind-wild air.
I watch from the street. As they turn, I see some widening—some womb—
On the Feast of the Annunciation Falling One Day After a Solar Eclipse
Eve’s Complaint
It wasn’t total here, the eclipse, and I almost missed it, stuck in the blasé patterns of another Monday—work, exhaustion, some tedious diversion, so many emails.
On days like this, even an eclipse can’t capture my affection like an open window’s chancy hope, like warm spring hazing through the screen, or the sensation of an ice cube, filmed with lemon, melting on my tongue.
I have this need to feel that my life is brighter than it seems to me.
Either way, the sky darkened, slightly, and by some mercy I observed it. I witnessed no fractured shadows, but I saw that light fade.
Annunciation Day
The air is soft and warm and shining. The sunlight falls, a hint of shadow in its cast. The palms and landscaped hedges scrape and shudder in a gusting breeze.
The angel enters.
Perhaps he clambers through an open doorway, or passes through a dusty window screen, or flashes in—a slap of sudden light—or takes his stately, turning step along her neighborhood’s packed street.
Either way she is afraid but rises to her fear with mounting courage—a late spring wave searching out its strength. Either way she bows her head and tells him, “Be it so. Be it unto me as to the palm that’s stirring in the courtyard, sifted by a searching breeze.”
The angel inhales.
Tradewinds tumble through her open window, pool calmly at her feet.
Our Lady of Tenderness
Who could confuse the aroma of urine with that of roses? The yellowing stench plumes over concrete. I look at the trees that grow up the street. Light flares off high offices into my eyes. I glimpse dull, hazed-over sky.
Our Lady of Vladimir’s tears are said to be myrrh. When she weeps, the faithful sop up her myrrh with cotton balls, pocket them, carry them home for the miracles. Sufferers are said to be healed. They speak of a scent that engulfs them, a scent like ten thousand roses.
She is also called Our Lady of Tenderness. Beads of myrrh drip from her eyes, from icons so drenched they’re wet to the touch. Skeptics kiss her infant son’s feet and receive mouthfuls of myrrh in return.
I elude buses and cars and passersby and a woman who squats on the corner to sing a brash, ragged tune.
Roses drop by the thousands. They attend every street.
This essay draws on a description of two myrrh-weeping icons of the Theotokos at Iveron Russian Orthodox Church in Honolulu, found online at www.orthodoxhawaii.org.
Alea Peister holds an MFA in spiritual writing from Seattle Pacific University and is passionate about cultivating the relationship between creativity and prayer with her Anglican-Catholic parish in Southern California. She is also a marketing copywriter at Deloitte Digital.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
