Mary Comes Down

Written By Jeannine Pitas

It is said
she was assumed into heaven.
Deathless, she stood on the moon,
was crowned with twelve stars.

But today in Rome I see her
begging outside the stone churches
that hold her statue.

In Jordan she sleeps in a refugee camp,
invites neighbors for tea,
shoots a film of her kids’ pick-up soccer games—
(she’s heard that in the West
they like this sort of thing).

In the San Fernando valley
she bends to harvest grapes,
she cuts garlic and gets half
the wages she was promised.

In Mexico she sells lace
and tells anyone who will listen
that four of her sons
have disappeared from Veracruz.

In Iowa, she sweeps the floor at Walmart
after the other workers have left.

Before this, she worked in a slaughterhouse.
Her task: to kill the male chicks.

She who once deflected
the Plague’s sharpest arrows
now tends to those dying of AIDS
in a Kenyan village.

Sometimes she makes the news
when her raft capsizes on the Mediterranean,
but it goes unnoticed
when she is sold into slavery,
dies in childbirth,
walks for a day to fetch water,
and finds the well dry.

Again and again
her son offers to raise her,
adorn her in royal blue,
a final glorious mystery.

Again and again
she shakes her head,
gives the diadem back,
casts off her mantle
to cover a child.

Jeannine Pitas

Jeannine M. Pitas is a writer, teacher, and Spanish-English literary translator living in Iowa, where she teaches at the University of Dubuque. Her first full-length poetry collection, Things Seen and Unseen, was published by Mosaic Press in 2019. Her most recent translation, We Do Not Live In Vain by acclaimed Uruguayan poet Selva Casal, was published in 2020 by Veliz Books. Her poems, articles and translations have recently appeared in U.S. Catholic, National Catholic Reporter, The Christian Century, Religion Dispatches, Convivium, The Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and The Paris Review. She also contributes to the Catholic blog Vox Nova and is the Spanish translation editor at Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. Some of her favorite poets include Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Denise Levertov, Pablo Neruda, and the various writers of the Book of Isaiah.

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