Tag: Poetry

The Black Madonna Series

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Dark Madonna

She knows in whose boredom the sun sleeps.
She studies space, fixes images in their absence,
hangs portraits the masters never saw
in their crafty light. Interrupts the talk
of dragonflies attending all creation.
She is the holder of pain, the unmoved target.

I wonder who this woman is
who moves as separately as silence,
who pauses to applaud a renegade dogwood,
red in still-green autumn, understands
the bloody revolution of ticking clocks,
the second-hand arrows that pierce
the flesh but leave it whole.

I hear her coming. She whispers between
the folds
of perception:
you will believe:
there is nothing left

but love.
-Kitty Yanson

I first became acquainted with the Black Madonna sometime in the early 1980s after getting sober, after my divorce, when I was trying to get through depressive episodes without the liquid medication I had used to try to treat them. First, it was a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa in my ancestral Poland which drew me toward her, then I searched out others, the Dark Madonnas of Spain, and the one enthroned in Chartres Cathedral. Eventually, I found that she was indeed an archetypal presence in the psyche, a sister of the Hindu Kali, the apocryphal Lilith, and the Egyptian Isis. In all of these forms, she embodies the union of opposites: life and death, spirit and matter, the conscious and the unconscious, body and soul. For me back then, she was the hope I had for healing and wholeness, and so she remains with me today, as I continue to find new ways to create while my body, beginning its 77th year this week, reminds me with a new ache every morning that mortality is destiny, a part of life. This image of this Great Mother, both womb and tomb, comforts me, sings me awake and to sleep in endless cycle of God. These three paintings are my way of exploring her great truth without words.

Kairos

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It swells like a bubble blown by breathing time:
You are stroking the cat on your lap
and suddenly know that this is Love
and together you are in a boundless world
the confines of the clock had kept you from.
The cat gets up and stretches.
You eat your breakfast.

Or you are on your morning walk,
and Eddie’s dark face illuminates your route
with “good morning” from his wheelchair
where he sits cheering on the accelerating sun.
You say good morning back,
and check the heart rate on your watch.

Or you see the image of Our Lady on the wall,
standing on a crescent moon with stars
around her head. She becomes a doorway
that opens just a crack to flash the glint
of God. Then a draft of time slams it shut,
leaving longing to stand eloquent
as an angel with a flaming sword
barring the entrance to Eden.

The decision now is yours:
Believe each moment is a hiccup,
hallucination, or errant imagining that
has nothing to do with the redundant daily?
Or maybe it is the Life living in life:
an invitation to Truth
that you never but always knew.

 The Small of Big

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There is a big God out there
counting the stars as they pass
through the gate to universal pastures,
feeding each its eon-ration of cloudy nebulae.

I am, I am told, a distant relative of stars,
a supernova memory
in its death-belch of hydrogen and dust,
heaven’s indigestion hardened into clay.

I am a quantum in creation,
a second in divine expression,
as brief as the urge to blink,
wee as a fruit-fly’s toe,
smaller than just a thought
and justly as large.

There is a little God too
(the same one, actually)
who dances with mockingbirds
on the hot asphalt lots,
who summons tiny suns from mosses
growing between paving stones,
who dares into play the stuttering desires
for rebirth and destruction.

This little God has a big job too
shepherding stars and children,
small in stature, large in being,
across the quadrants of our park
constructing the contagion of laughter
under our earth-shining moon,
to entangle us with hope.

-Kitty Yanson

Ritual

Kitty Yanson1 Comment

When I was a child, I used to dress
and redress the body of the baby God,
Infant of Prague, with satin clothes
tailored to liturgical rhymes,
running my fingers across the hemline
rows of sequins, struggling to pull
the ruched armholes around the orb
of power his innocence cradled
in one tiny hand. I love you, Jesus,
I prayed as I returned his plaster vulnerability
to the altar atop my Uma’s chest of drawers.

In the afternoon after school, I met my friends
and a drafted brother or two to play Communion
in the basement, bribing my bros with chocolate
Jesus Necco Wafers giving the licorice ones
that nobody wanted to my ex-bestie Gerry
for some unremembered grievance,               
grabbing a bed-sheet from the laundry pile
as vestment across my outlawed priestly shoulders
to dole out sugar in lieu of transcendent mystery
around the sweet table of childhood.

But these were stories of another time
when I played with God, splashing
in the shallow waters of rituals’ river,
too young to swim in the deep end of faith.
Now I finger the decades,
counting faults and graces
bead upon bead, blurring
into wholeness in the rosary of my years.
I dress and redress again
that child of Prague, swaddling
his naked holiness in satin comfort
with sequins I have poorly sewn upon it,
now a broken princess playing with God
in second innocence repeating
and repeating the ongoing ceremony
of the all-along truth of love.
-Kitty Yanson

Turning

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The starlings in the dying oak,
loud as children in a schoolyard,
gather force for an evening murmuration
that will clot the sky with commas.
I pause to wonder at and wonder again,
(though I have seen many times)
this turning and turning of the dusk
like the turning of the soil in spring, 
like the turning circles of life
in this chittering world seen once,
seen always, ever-changing, ever-same.

Wisdom is a pattern-finder
seeing circles in straightforward time.
She lives behind a veil that sometimes stirs
in dark breezes to unmask our shared laughter
in a sudden, spectacular sun
much like when a sinner squints
through the confessional grate to find
a person breathing the equal air
of absolution in reciprocal eclipse.

So I look for circles in these ever-turns:
the world cracking open like an eggshell
pouring its gold into a pink china bowl,
like the empty vase’s round absence
that promises tomorrow’s rose,
like the eye in the great storm in the Gulf
churning up our broken trust,
like the unwinding white of the moonflowers
dilating silence in the eyes of night.

-Kitty Yanson

Boulder

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We should have ended in Boulder, Colorado.
A place named Boulder sounds precisely bound
and self-contained. There trees would bleed no shadows
on the ground. A site so definitely nouned

would season quickly: leaves would snap in fall,
shear off, and drop like rocks; no subtle drift
to catch like a rotted pear in my throat and call
up dreams of flawless summers. Ends would be swift

and kind. In Boulder, time would hold no grey
and lonely voids for memory to fill
with breath; no twilights, no false dawns would stay
the final blow. Endings would strike once. And kill.

But they don’t. Each parting has a thousand strands,
Each over isn’t, each shattered boulder, sand.

-Kitty Yanson

My reading of “Boulder”