In praise of the moon
Pale as frozen milk,
you look ready to melt
into the clouds but hours
later you outshine
the street lamps,
Jupiter below you
like a full stop.
Amen. So be it.
You’re in your heaven,
all’s well with the world
and in Mary’s month
you bloom rose-gold
above green fields,
green trees, warm nests.
Sky’s calendar
for the earth you’ll orbit
while eggs crack,
fledglings squawk,
young birds wing
across each phase
of your journey’s light.
Moon and Jupiter conjunction -- David Finlay
May is Mary's month. The Greeks dedicated May to Artemis, the goddess of fecundity, and the Romans linked the month to Flora, the goddess of bloom and blossoms. The connection evolved into associations with Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the 13th century the Castilian poet/king Affonso X el Sabio wrote the "Cantigas de Santa Maria" in which she was directly associated with several dates in May. In the 17th century special observances consecrating the entire month to her began to be held in Italia. Late in the 18th century Latomia vowed to devote the month to Mary to counteract infidelity and immorality among his students at the Roman College of the Society of Jesus, and the practice spread to other Jesuit colleges and then to Catholic churches. Between 1883-1889 pope Leo XIII issued 12 encyclicals and 5 apostolic letters on the rosary in which the practice was popularized. The Gospel of Luke (1:46-55) portrayed Mary reciting what became known as the Magnificat (Latin for "[My soul] magnifies [the Lord]"); in 1878, 8 months after Gerard Manley Hopkins was consecrated as a Jesuit priest, he composed “May Magnificat.”
ReplyDeleteMay is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—
This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.