mary Christmas Bonus: Magnificat this kiss My soul magnifies the poor as soft as cotton the sore the raw over my breasts and my spirit rejoices in God my downcast all shiny bright my outcast my twig-bone wrong caste something is in this night for He regards the low estate oh Lord have mercy on me the no-go estate the empty plate and squats there with those generations. I feel a garden For at Whose Name the Cosmos shakes in my mouth and canyons quake sought sanctuary within a womb between my legs a young girl's chaste, unopened room i see a tree a sparse unblemished catacomb and holy is He amongst the lame. Lucille Clifton. Good News About The Earth (1972). from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 His mercy is on those who fear Him BOA Editions Ltd, 2012 hear Him those near Him in desert flapping bivouac or dehydrated barrio. island mary The night sky rolled out by His arm, after the all been done and i the preening proud ignore his balm and slink towards the warlock charm one old creature carried on of their small ambitions; another creature’s back, i wonder and those on thrones end up alone could i have fought these thing? replaced by fly-pecked innocents. surrounded by no son of mine save old men calling mother like in the tale He only eats with the hungry, the astrologer tell, i wonder and if they don't, he too refrains; could i have walk away when voices and as for the rich - singing in my sleep? i one old woman. a table cannot be found for them. always i seem to worrying now for another young girl asleep My soul magnifies the poor in the plain evening. the sore the raw what song around her ear? and my spirit rejoices in God what star still choosing? my outcast.

Lucille Clifton. Two Headed Woman (1972). from The Stewart Henderson. Homeland. Hodder & Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 BOA Stoughton, 1993. Editions, 2012

Our Lady of Justice 1 of 5 Annunciation Stations of the Cross.

Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it Station #4 - meets his mother I know it is—and that if once it hailed me it ever does— Mary, Mother of Failure, And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction You met your son at the end, not as towards a place, but it was a tilting in a place beyond words, within myself, and must have felt faithless as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where and empty and alone. it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam We pray that we may have the grace in what shone at me to live with our own only able to endure it by being no one and so stories of failure, specifically myself I thought I’d die knowing that love can continue from being loved like that. even when things end.

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, W.W. Norton & Amen. Company, 2008.

Station #13 - Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother

Mary, Mother of Death, You held the corpse of your young son — the worst of fears — in your arms, as he went where we have not yet gone. We mark this with silence and art. May we also learn from fear, because fear won’t save us from anything. Amen.

Pádraig Ó Tuama. Daily Prayer from the Corrymeela Community. Canterbury Press, 2017.

Our Lady of Justice 2 of 5 House of the Virgin Mary ,

There have been no miracles here: no I walk down the flagstone path knowing wall lined with abandoned crutches or someday my mother will die and I too offerings of roses browning in the sun will walk through her house imagining left by the once blind or the once dying, her thoughts those years she lived alone: no robed apparitions making promises how many times might she have paused to any children or peasants wandering in the doorway of the bedroom where these fields, in fact there is some doubt she held my dying father for the last time, whether she lived here at all. It is difficult or sit at the kitchen table where she read to imagine the mother of a savoir living the telegram from Cuba announcing her in such a simple house of hewn stones, mother’s death? How many times a sentinel of cypress pines guarding her did she think of replacing the furniture quietly spending the last years of her life in my old bedroom, or fall asleep alone among the silent bows of the olive trees, in the Florida room? How many nights cooking meals in the hearth day by day, did she lie in bed staring at the threads carrying water from the tricking spring of the window shears in the moonlight, that must of sounded exactly the same praying the , mother to mother, two thousand years ago, before woman to woman, waiting for a miracle, were built for her, before pilgrims crawled or giving thanks forever and ever amen? on bloody knees to kneel before her gaze and kiss her bare feet chiseled in marble. Richard Blanco. Looking for the Gulf Motel. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Only the stones, the pines, the spring can know for sure if she lived here once. Still, I light a candle at the votive stand, not because I believe this place is sacred, or because I was Joseph in the fifth-grade Nativity play, not because Sister Pancretila assured me she was the mother of God, but simply because she was, after all, a mother. Gazing into the tiny flames I imagine her sorrow: Did she miss Jerusalem or forget herself in this foreign land? Did she ever stop grieving her son, or ever find peace in these hills, accept all that was meant to be – now and at the hour of her death?

Our Lady of Justice 3 of 5 Eurofighter Typhoon

My daughters are playing outside with plastic hoops; the elder is trying to hula, over and over – it falls off her hips, but she keeps trying, and the younger is watching and giggling, and they’re happy in the bright afternoon. I’m indoors at the hob with the door open so I can see them, because the elder might trip, and the younger is still a baby and liable to eat dirt, when out of clear skies a jet comes in low over the village. At the first muted roar the elder runs in squealing then stops in the kitchen, her eyes adjusting to the dimness, looking foolish and unsure. I drop the spoon and bag of peas and leave her frightened and tittering, wiping my hands on my jeans, trying to walk and not run, because I don’t want to scare the baby who’s still sat on the patio alone, looking for her sister, bewildered, trying to figure why she’s gone – all this in the odd, dead pause of the lag – then sound catches up with the plane and now its grey belly’s right over our house with a metallic, grinding scream like the sky’s being chainsawed open and the baby’s face drops to a square of pure fear, she tips forward and flattens her body on the ground and presses her face into the concrete slab. I scoop her up and she presses in shuddering, screaming her strange, halt pain cry and it’s all right now I tell her again and again, but it’s never all right now – Christ have mercy – my daughter in my arms can’t steady me – always some woman is running to catch up her children, we dig them out of the rubble in parts like plaster dolls – Mary Mother of God have mercy, mercy on us all.

Fiona Benson Vertigo & Ghost..Cape Poetry, 2019.

Our Lady of Justice 4 of 5 Our Lady Of The Apocalypse (to Polyhymnia – Muse of Sacred Poetry)

Our Lady of the apocalypse who never closed your heart to the dissolute, pray for us who gave shelter in broken down Georgian tenements, who kept the doors open to the demented ones, those who came in rags and miasmas of foul odour, in delirium tremens, the worn out old spunkers, the displaced relicts of imperial trauma.

O sweet daughter of Memory, veiled in enigma, who brought longed for oblivion to the meths drinkers, the dipsos, the alcos, the put down no hopers, those who came in from chaos, from cold, from winds, from rains, to sleep it all off in hallways, in stairwells, who rent the long night with sobs, who cried out to you in the throes of their last agony, grant them eternal succour.

Paula Meehan. Poetry Ireland Review #124. Part of the 11-sonnet sequence ‘Museum’

Our Lady of Justice 5 of 5