The Gospel Of Mary Poem by Deborah DeNicola

I was not alarmed when the doves continued to coo
though their wings were burning.

I was on fire too.
It was morning. I was there

with the eleven. We were gathered
in the vestibule of the upper room.

Our breath thickened, colors deepened.
For just one instant I saw the root of love

staked through the ceiling. But so few of them
received the vision at its core.

They tried to think it through. It was not
for thought. It was more

for holding and becoming. Light
brandished from our fingertips

like swords of warrior angels.
When it extinguished,

I flashed my ordinary hands
and we all laughed.

Because they asked, I told them
what he said to me in private,

I didn't say he'd kissed me
on the mouth. I told them how

I met the savior inside my head.
How our thoughts entwined

like bean stalks
through swatches of clouds.

How he said thought
created matter, and that fear

is ingenious for damaging the world.
He said Here is the soul, here the Spirit,

the mind
a naive child between them.

I drew a diagram in air of the soul's
escalation, my fingers sparking

the seven heavens. I tried to show
what rushes naked, leaving the body

like a town one no longer cares to visit.
How the soul, small and homeless,

remembers then, and rejoins Spirit.
How, in the aftermath, oblivion

is transient, and darkness is illusion,
both habits to be broken.

Peter and Andrew debunked
my 'strange ideas' and woman that I was,

I wept. Levi stepped in and calmed the others
the way the savior woke in the rocking

boat and calmed the sea. They all looked
at me in wonder. I spent the rest of my life

on earth infused with his apparition
because I felt that I was worthy.