Mary of Bethany

Perhaps it wasn’t easy for her either.
Perhaps she felt the urgent tug her sleeve
as much as Martha did and had to fight
for stillness as she sat there at his feet.
Perhaps a dream, a grief, a love, a loss
so flooded her entire consciousness
that only now and then could she emerge
to give her full attention to his voice.
Perhaps she didn’t wholly want to be there
(who knew what happened when you got this close?)
but still she willed herself to stay beside him
and hoped that, as she did so, love would grow.
She came (perhaps) in restless emptiness 
and found herself commended, welcomed, blessed.

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Hello, kind friends. I’m back! Please forgive the long hiatus. I’ve come out the other side (praise be) of an extremely intense and demanding few months in which a fair few things fell by the wayside, poetry among them. In one way it was hard to stop: I was so pleased with myself that I’d posted almost every week for more than a year and afraid that if I stopped, I’d never restart. But as a kind friend reminded me, I was under no obligation to post here, and exhausted and stressed as I was it was a relief to relinquish the “ought” and just let it slide.

I haven’t even tried to write again until recently, but words are starting to come again. If you’ve hung around this long, thank you! I’m grateful. I’m hoping to post here more regularly again, even if it’s not every week.

Today’s poem is another riff on one of my favourite Bible stories. I’ve written two sonnets in the past from Martha’s perspective (one of which I shared here) and have wanted for some time to write one from Mary’s, but a Mary poem has stubbornly refused to appear until today.

Mary is always seen as the good girl in this Mary-and-Martha scene (and she was of course commended by Christ), but without diminishing the goodness of her choice, I wanted to explore her motivations. Maybe she wasn’t a natural contemplative or some sort of first-century proto-nun. Maybe her heart was as distracted and divided as yours and mine. Maybe she made her choice in spite of, not because of, her natural bents and inclinations.

Maybe.

And if she did, isn’t that a hopeful thing for us?