Michael Shepherd - ! ! 'Woman -'

How can a mother ever quite forget,
or quite relinquish in her memory,
that state which babies share with saints:
to be free from all desires of mind?

And so the mother must take on
that strange but natural responsibility
to desire, for the baby in her charge; but then,
one day, to learn to stop to ‘mother’
for the child’s own growing sake..

And how much more, instinct and reason
must have played in Her; given a responsibility
greater than the world itself?

And who can ever know those private conversations
between the growing Child of God
and young earthly mother of that heavenly Child?

So, when at that wedding and its showing-forth
the servants were unsure, She was there
to say ‘Do what He says’..

And from John comes that bald account
which we must read each for ourself:
‘Woman, what have you to do with Me…? ’

He, not yet ready as He thought,
for destiny; divisive miracles?

Who knows how many private conversations
lay behind that question and its rhetoric –
public, and recorded by that deeply impressed scribe…

and whether it was said with gentle smile
(who reads the words of Jesus as from One
who almost always smiled – His words, a gift?)

or said with firm authority, which we may take
as heard by Her, not with a fusser’s shame,
but with Magnificat still ringing in Her mind?

And then, perhaps, She learned to grieve
and not to grieve, beneath a holy Cross..

I think this passage is forever read
by men in one way; women in another;
and perhaps, that’s just how it should be.

Michael Shepherd

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/woman-70/