The poet and spiritual writer Luci Shaw, who has a gift for packing incisive theology and arresting imagery into a few lines of free verse, wrote a wonderful poem about Mary cradling her newborn son titled “Mary’s Song.”
It’s one of the poems in Shaw’s book Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation.
In “Mary’s Song,” the mother of Jesus sees her newborn as “a small hot naked star fallen to my arms.” She marvels at how he who was with God and the Holy Spirit in the beginning “overflowed all skies, all years.”
I love this advent poem and commend the poetry of Luci Shaw to anyone who may be unfamiliar with her beautiful writing. Go here for her website. And check out her landscape photography at the site as well.
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“Mary’s Song”
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest…
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must seen him torn.
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