Mary Mother
- Mary Mother
She must have seen the blunt nose of death when he set his face steadily toward Jerusalem and perhaps it was right and perhaps there was no other way
Yet the sword so long impaled in her heart slipped, turned its edge against the inner chamber and the body that had so irrevocably said yes to such a long-executed consumption writhed in pure being the frozen light, friable carving
sculpted of sheer pain
Susan McCaslin is a poet and Instructor of English at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C., who received her doctorate at the University of British Columbia in Twentieth-Century British Poetry in 1984. She has authored eight volumes of poetry, including A Plot of Light (2004) and At the Mercy Seat (2003). McCaslin is the editor of the anthologies A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry (1998) and Poetry and Spiritual Practice: Selections from Contemporary Canadian Poets (2002). Her published books are listed on her Web site, www.susanmccaslin.ca.
