Mary, Mother of Poets

The poet is a cultural crime fighter,

A merchant of the timeless,

A calligrapher of gravestone inscriptions.

The poet wanders wasted lands, and

Ponders books of ancient lore.

The poet tosses runes skyward, and

Traces the descent of inscrutable phrases.

The poet leans into the cave of echoes,

Listening for words spoken before speech began.

Ancient poets are being found in melting glaciers,

Their names, long etched in ice,

Now melt into a crevasse of collective forgetfulness.

Yet, lo, the boldest poet is a banal figure, deaf and dumb,

Next to the singular lady who conversed with glorious Gabriel.

The chosen woman who bears

The body of God,

The scar of the sword,

And the mission of forgiving the crowd calling for the death of her son.

Her ever-silent, inwardly-listening husband heard

The dream-speech of divine messengers,

And used the sign language of lowered eyes, bent knees, and folded hands

To tell what he’d heard.

Happy the mother who magnifies the Lord,

Who rejoices in God the savior.

Happy are we to have a mother who hears the whispered dying wishes

Of the lowest and the highest.

Happy to have a blessed mother who shares

Her gravitational hearing,

Her galactic awareness,

Her celestial serenity and

The super nova intensity of her love.

Queen mother of Being,

Holy fountain of mercy.

Listening silently to each soul.

Every person’s prayer pondered in her eternal perspective.

© copyright 2025 Tom Medlar

Antwerp – The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a copy after Peter Paul Rubens (1613) in Lady Chapel in st. Charles Borromeo church on September 5, 2013 in Antwerp, Belgium