Content Warnings - Implied blood and child death

An ekphrasis poem based off of: The Depiction of the Madonna and Child – Unknown 

 

Red thunder rules over the lowlands. 

Its reign never late, 

true to the ordination  

spoken softly by the plain. 

 

She hears them 

sitting in her small wicker chair, 

hidden in prairie hollows  

and the shushes of shaking leaves,

the august wind whispering revelation 

on the dark horizon. 

 

Her son breathes its air,  

lips open to the sky, 

only knowing its wonder 

instead of its weight.  

For thunder heralded his birth  

and all the world had sounded. 

It's triumph loud from the  

cherub's trumpets 

thrumming so deep 

she had kept him 

tucked close to her chest. 

 

She clutches him again, 

but he leans forward in her lap  

and plays with angels  

she cannot see.

It is no longer her right.

Yet the thousands of eyes

and their mutters betray

their word to a mother

to not be afraid.

 

If she isn't careful 

his fingers find the wood  

worshiped by many hands. 

She lifts him away

and lays him to bed, but there 

resides a thorn of halos 

at his temple as he lies still

and dreams of Bethel, 

practicing for a future  

he must surely not know. 

As she touches the wood

she thinks,

Not now, not yet. 

 

But there is an invisible storm 

hidden in his eyes 

and those notes of thunder  

are heavy on his face. 

She waits for the day  

the tempest will break. 

Its red made real,  

written by the 

psalms of his hands as it  

spills to the dirt. 

 

Her son is older than the earth,  

his time is shorter still. 

When it comes, the world 

will sing almighty 

too big for his body, 

but until then  

she will bear the sound.