Marian Ecstasy

A Poem by Mary Jo Bang

My life in some god’s hand—
I thought I heard someone say “Babe”
and I came. Beata Beatrix, my eyes
sometimes closed and sometimes open
in time to see a dizzying flight
of red doves and to feel a bliss every bit
as intense as a deckle-edged opium
poppy wedged in the seam between
Heaven and Earth alongside a pain
that knows no hurt and an unnumbered
train on its way to a distant planet.
Transverberation, the striking through
who you were (that trap) to who
you will become. The one and only one.

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Madonna in Ecstasy, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, 1989

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