When My Name Was Mary

When my name was Mary
did you know that I loved you?
Did you know how I adored your
simple grace in your white-robed
Jesus-face?

These are the times I surrender as
our souls separate and we walk into daybreak
or another poem in the light bodies
we have fashioned with tender parchment beaks
even though anguish is my red veil and lust my
frailest body,
a thin red line of mortality
separates us where only wild
sunflowers dance
in our reborn children’s hearts,
would detain us in the land where the pale rider
meets the sunset in a well-deserved goodbye

golden flecks bow to reveal another Universe
beyond this nascent star we have long last reached,
echoes of an Egyptian crescent moon.
shimmering in the rushes along the White and the Blue Nile
rising in a white buffalo hide
sacred
in the plains of a tribal legend,
where the hollow reed and the air forms
a song only Lovers sing.