This week’s poem in the Catholic Poetry Room is by Fred Gallagher.
Immaculate
In a morning’s mind, I fly back to the lonesome tribe
of night and day nomads and a girl (was She olive
and black-eyed, like a late moonless eve?) who had
not known man, hearing news, from of a messenger
come outside the sky, seeking some simple Fiat
that would change the world forever. How could
it all be so without the alabastrine luster of wings
soaring to a pellucid and numinous womb? It was
Her “Let it be done unto me” and the whisk of
white-feathered forelimbs that alighted in the
black-eyed girl’s never faltering or graceless soul,
that never carried the primeval blemish of mine
or of yours. He had created in Her a clean heart.
He had created in Her a heart to be pierced by
harrowing visions of a cross and the flowing claret
of the Child She carries without breach or lapse
or rupture. Even though her consent is the crux
of anamnesis, She was already chosen, unsullied,
pristine in all the ways we cannot ken because we
began with sin, and she did not! Those black eyes
peer into the countenance of the Son of Man,
shaping maternally His humanity forth in time
to the consecrated destiny to which She, with
no primal transgression, is eternally appended.
Fred Gallagher is an editor with Good Will Publishers, the parent company of TAN Books/Saint Benedict Press. He has authored three books on bereavement, three children’s books and published poetry in college journals. As he continues to write poetry, his focus more and more has turned to poems with specifically Catholic references, themes, and questions.
