Selected poems
The undoubting Thomas
The apocryphal text, 'The Passing of Mary', assigns an important role to Thomas. Painters have also been drawn to its final ascension scene.
I was the Torah vowel, missing until body sang breath
into the canticle, while Magdalene was banished
from skin.
~
The Lord returned again, this time
to the olive-mount where the feastday beacons
once burned, to prise His mother gently from this life
as He had promised, and bind me to a second absence,
as if I had slipped India's knot into a void momentarily
beyond His reach.
Those of the twelve who remained
saw Him rise into the air as sure as morning.
He spread his arms to the widths of the universe:
all matter merged in His being and all time
compressed into a single moment; their flesh
turned a burnished copper, their eyes milk-blind.
When He withdrew his wingspan to the present
and their senses righted, they noticed Mary
at His side, the near-death gauntness of her face
ceded to a dandelion-halo, her body a cicada shell
on the ground where she had stood among them.
They feared desecration, so hid her corpse
in an unmarked tomb.
I had been preaching
to the vaunted and downtrodden alike. Two
comely young royals sought me out, from a thirst
for the exotic or rebellion, or because love at first
is a stranger. I espoused true marriage as one to faith,
the body a vessel for acts of worship, not desire.
I closed my eyes to draw new thought. When
I reopened them an empty stone slab lay before me
in a cavern rough-hollowed but flooded with a light
that had penetrated its roof. Mary hovered
in the light, as a gull is both sea and air, in a flowing robe,
her outstretched hand bearing the cincture I would need
to recount the mystery to the others.
~
What succour then
for my own mother, her son lost to the rapture
of a new covenant, who pitied the belief she had birthed
in him as unrequited and trailed a black sail
into a wilderness he never left?
A death in India
'The Acts of Thomas' records Thomas' death in India by the spears of the soldiers of King Misdaeus.
The kingdom I foretold, greater than his, his edicts
chatter, riches valued as lint, that even to lie
on the marital bed was to court idolatry
of the senses, the succession at risk: thus the guards
marched me into the hills.
An allotted task: no cruciform
pattern, no declension of wounds according to offence,
a simple frenzy of blows to shorten the time required
to execute the order, then a trench-grave below where
I gurgled past life, but deep