The silver net

Chapter 12: MAGDALENE

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About This Book

A sequence of lyrical meditations that shifts between dreamlike visions, confessional solitude, and mythic or biblical reverie. Recurring images of sea and shipwreck, roses and gardens, and masked or legendary figures are used to probe longing, shame, desire, and the hope for spiritual renewal. Poems alternate between dramatic monologue, fable-like sketches, and brief nocturnes, exploring the tensions between illusion and revelation, life and death, and love as both ensnaring and ennobling, producing a compact, contemplative cycle of symbolist-inflected verse.

MAGDALENE

Now she lay on the white marble flags, and her hair

Made a soft cloud of gold, through the cloud here and there

Peeped the warm, rosy skin. And her eyes were as dreams

Dreamt in youth by a god, while her kiss-craving lips,

Red with love, haunted men. In her pallid despair

She had come from her palace, she knelt at my feet

And her tears as they fell burnt my flesh. Then she spoke—

Whispered sins music made like a nun’s clinking beads.

Magdalene, Magdalene, glowing shame of the world!

Just a touch of my lips on her brow crimson tinged,

And her head like a child’s lay at rest on my breast.

Lullaby, Magdalene, yours my kiss and my song.