AP

The Shulamite

An Ode to Mary of Magdala

I am the woman with seven weathers in her,

sun and eclipse housed in one trembling body —

call it madness, call it the mind’s own Babel,

call it the wheel that will not let me in.

My hands count and recount the hours like beads

worn thin from fingering — is it enough, is it right, is it clean —

while the vineyard of myself goes to seed

and strangers say what I have always been:

harlot, they say. demon-fogged, unclean, undone.

Seven devils they hung on my one bruised name

as if grief were a filth to be scrubbed from the bone,

as if the ache in me were mine to blame.

I am both of your directions, Life —

hanging downward most, and yet somehow strong

as a cobweb strung across the wind’s own knife,

more truly myself in the frost’s cold glistening song.

My beaded rays still hold the very hue

I have only seen once, in a painter’s borrowed light —

ah Life, they have cheated you, they have cheated you too,

calling the web a wound, and the shimmer a blight.

O daughters of whatever city holds me now,

tell him — if you should pass him on the road —

tell him I am faint with  a hunger he alone satisfies,

while my soul’s vineyard lies untended, unhoed.

But someone is standing in the garden’s grey.

I mistake Him, always, for the gardener —

for the ordinary shape that tends what I betray,

that kneels where the myrrh and the losses were.

He does not ask what is wrong with you.

He says my name. Just that. Mary.

And the whole reeling architecture I stumble through —

the pendulum, the pit, the century of worry —

goes suddenly still, the way a held breath goes,

the way a bruised iris opens toward one lamp.

Rabboni. I would clutch Him, but He knows

the grasping is its own particular cramp,

and says: do not hold what was not made to be held.

Go and tell them. So the first apostle

of the empty tomb is a woman the world has spelled

wrong for two thousand years — mislabeled, hostile

only to herself. He does not flinch from the tide

that rises and falls in me. He does not compel or possess —

My Helper offers an uncontrolling love, His Spirit whispering peace,

quietly abiding until the redemption.

And I have dreamed the trumpet and the tearing sky,

the watchmen scattered, every lock undone,

every fractured pendulum come home to lie

still at last in the gravity of the Son.

Not sanity as the world once meant the word —

not the flattening of the storm to a manageable grey —

but every locked room of the self finally heard,

every scattered self gathered the way

light is gathered back into a single ray.

He comes not to erase the wound but to wear it,

the way He wore the nails, the way He’ll display

the scars forever — glorified, not hidden, not buried.

I will not be the footnote, the case-file, the fallen one;

I will be the witness who ran and was believed —

the last watchman lays his old club down, undone.

Who is this that comes up from the wilderness

leaning on the arm of the one Beloved,

her mind a bed of spices, bitter, blessed,

where once the little foxes came and rioted?

I am dark, but comely — dark with all my weathers,

comely because He looked and did not look away.

Set me as a seal upon your heart forever;

love, in the end, was stronger than the clay,

stronger than the chemistry, the compulsion’s chain,

stronger than the seven that could not be my name.

Many waters could not quench this, nor the rain

of all my private floods put out the flame.

I was sleeping, but my heart — my fractured, faithful heart —

was awake the whole time, waiting for the knock.

He found me where I was, in whatever part

was mine to offer: garden, tomb, or rock.

I am my Beloved’s, and His desire is toward me.

loved out of the wreckage, into what I’ll be,

till every weather in me finally clears to one

unclouded morning — not a stranger, but the Son.

– Nicos Kaloyirou