Roads Walked and Barred

1.

I pray for him each morning.

Denied a place where my virginity

could flourish, I became obedient

to a husband who joked on our wedding night

how I had narrowly escaped

having my pretty little thing

locked up where no one could enjoy it.

I feel my baby kick as I leave church

and wonder if the child leaps for joy

like John did in the womb of Holy Elisabeth

when she met Mary.

The convent was denied to me

but I pray for Ambrosias each morning

here in church in the quiet of dawn,

before the heat of day, before the heat

of cooking. It is the only cool and quiet I know.

2.

Mother said we paid our tithe to God.

Ambrosias, she said, went for a monk and I

should therefore marry. One from ten, she said,

sufficed. The priest agreed with her,

it was arranged. I tried not to be sad.

There are two roads, the abbess told me,

and they are equally difficult.

The road I walk is pain of childbirth,

pride of the world, my desire to my husband,

his ruling over me, and the future, so unknown,

filled with children yet unborn, sorrows

unlived—yes, joys as well, I will admit.

The path I was denied, she said, is a long, cold road,

like the snow on the distant mountains of Binalud,

austere and beautiful, yet not an easy way,

fraught with different perils:

From those to whom much is given, she said, much is expected.

3.

There are the dances, the feasts,

the pleasure of intimacy, the joy

of carrying a child. On the road barred to me

there would have been consecration, the silences

I long for filled with God, the joy

of living life wholly to the Lord.

Misunderstanding, strife at times, comes

between my husband and me, and my parents

and his. I haggle in the market place,

broken things are never fixed, and constant work

wears me out. The convent, I imagine,

has its own set of pains—I know in fact,

I have been told as much, and when

I was a little girl some nuns were kind

but some would slap my face and call me dolt

when I got my catechism wrong.

Dust settles on the shoulders of shepherd and king,

and the dust of sin could even creep

into a holy place. I should have no illusions about that.

The pleasure of a nun is to be stoled

in her virginity, white as egret’s down,

as stars, moonlight, carried to heaven

in a vessel filled with her unmingled essence.

I am a vessel pierced, but the cicatrix

is children, pleasure, attraction of warmth,

obedience to the first command to bear

fruit, multiply, and fill the earth,

the task given to Eve, Mother of all.