Birthing Hope
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash
A Poem by Rosa Lía Gilbert
I want to sit with Mary
and ask her how she did it.
Birthed the Savior of the world
in such a human way.
I want to ask her if she thought
it wouldn’t hurt, because he was her baby.
If maybe she assumed she’d be spared
the labor, avoid Eve’s curse all together.
Wasn’t she a virgin anyway?
I want to kneel beside her, ask her
to tell me all of it. Remember the animals,
what they smelled like. Recall the dirt
under her fingernails from clenching the ground
and the weariness of her back from having nowhere to lay.
I want to go back and say to her, “So,
you’re telling me, not even the mother
of Emmanuel was allowed to opt out of birth?
That the vessel for God’s flesh
still suffered under the penalties of death?”
But in the end, a bloody baby slid out of her body anyway.
A burning bosom let down milk.
In the end, I sigh in relief knowing
Mary birthed Jesus so ordinarily.
That she was not exempt from the toil of his arrival.
In the end, I just want to sit with Mary,
hold her hand, stroke her sweaty hair,
let her know it takes a lot to birth
hope out of me, too.
Rosa Gilbert is a publishing assistant at Calla Press Publishing LLC. Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Spanish is her first language, but it was through learning English that she fell in love with words. Her work has been published at Ekstasis, Clayjar Review, The Way Back to Ourselves, Vessels of Light, Prosetrics Literary Magazine, among others. She lives in Ohio with her husband and daughter. You can find her writing at https://rosagilbert.substack.com/ and @rosagilbertpoetry.
