When the contractions begin in earnest, Mary
is finally able to cry the tears that have not come
for ten long moons, but have instead accumulated
against some hidden blockage, swelling her belly
beneath her wool dress.
When the Roman soldier held her down
behind the market stall, pinned her twisting arms
beneath her bunched up shift and grunted into her
like a stud ram, she did not cry. Not that evening,
listening to her own small voice tell her mother
why she was late; not later, in the mikveh,
watching the man’s filth float from her
and hang in the water. Not the first time she vomited up
her mother’s good brown bread, or when the moon
waxed large and she did not bleed. Not even,
on the path to see the midwife for a solution,
at the sudden rustling of white wings
and intimations: when she decided
not to set down this ugliness, but to carry it
and carry it. And then finding that Joseph knew
and would carry it with her.
But here in this hay spotted with goat dung,
while Joseph—bless him—brushes the flies
from her eyes, while the auntie he has found
in this strange city reminds her to keep
her voice deep and her throat open:
helpless tears. It is too much. It is too heavy.
It is out of the same private place the ugliness began
that she sobs and screams the black head of God
into the world, crowned with vernix and the circle of her own skin
and wringing out of her his first and her favorite
miracle: living water
that pours not only from her womb, but from her eyes,
for here is the ugliness she has carried for so long
and it is soft and small and beautiful.
And later when he makes the water into wine
it is for her, and no one but they two understand
that it is not the first time he has
taken something common—
brackish, fetid, still—
and made it breathing and brilliant:
a cup that can be drunk without fear.
