WHAT CANNOT BE DONE AGAIN

TWO POETIC RENDERINGS OF The PIETA

When the Divine intersects with the human, there is no  second act. It creates a rupture in time and humanity. 

This poem by the great Rilke startled me when I first read it. He helped me to grasp the uniqueness of the INCARNATON.  No part of it can ever come again.

Pietà Rainer Maria Rilke

Fills now my cup, and past thought is my fulness thereof. I harden as a stone sets hard at its heart. Hard that I am, I know this alone: that thou didst grow— — — — — — and grow, to outgrow, as too great pain, my heart’s reach utterly. Now liest thou my womb athwart, now can I not to thee again give birth. I had to read it over several times.  AND then I  recalled how startled I had been when  on my first trip to Rome I went into Saint Peters in the Vatican and  was greeted by the actual  Monument of grief of a Mother holding the body of her adult son.    In a rush of emotion that erupted in me I  sobbed and  had to sit in a pew to just absorb the power of the Truth I had  just seen for the first time. That Mary was  truly the physical mother of Jesus, that she watched him suffer and die, and  then she was left with this form of her son on her lap for the last time.  The visceral reality of Jesus and the intimacy of his relationship to his mother  was all laid out before me.  Here is another poem by another poet and it is a poem that I did not know. Davie imagines Mary living on as a  lonely bereft widow, and childless  she  moves towards old age one of the many old ladies who must" learn to live alone in  public gardens". Diminished.  Her  Assumption into Heaven is not imagined by this poet. Pieta by Donald Davie Issue no. 33 (Winter–Spring 1965) Snow-white ray coal-black earth will swallow now. The heaven glows when twilight has kissed it, but your white face which I kiss now does not. Be still acacia boughs, I talk with my small one. We speak softly. Be still. The sky is blind with white cloud behind the swooping birds. The garden lies round us and birds in the dead tree’s bare boughs shut and open themselves. Be still, or be your unstill selves, birds in the tree. The wind is grievous to the willow. The underside of its leaves as the wind compels them is ashen. Bow never, nor dance willow. How can you bear it? My head goes back on my neck fighting the pain off. Willow in the wind, share it. I have to learn how time can be passed in public gardens. There my dead lies idle. Much bereaved and sitting under a sunny wall old women stare through me. I come too soon and yet at last to fixity, being alone and with a crone’s pastimes. This poem would have us  believe that Mary-- after Angelic visits, and that  scene in the stable, and that miracle she caused at  Cana, and the agony of standing at the foot of the cross-- just drifted into the  "crone's pastimes?"  There is something  misogynistic in that dismissive phrase.  MY VOTE IS WITH RILKE.