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Philip Wilson

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Virgo Dolorosa

These rosary beads I bought last year
on a package to Florence turned out wrong.
The metal’s good, the wood is true, but they’re

a false combination, illustrating
the life of the Virgin and not of Christ.
She asked me about them when I rang,

sent me out that Friday night a final time
to find stones that were Dominican,
blessed by a priest, at a reasonable price.

I got what she needed. ‘You’re a good man,’
she whispered when I handed them over
and I felt as relieved as a slave whose span

of oxygen had lasted: the diver
returning triumphant with the pearls,
seizing life for a little while longer,

though in fact they didn’t really work that well:
not for her, who took them underground,
nor for me, stuck here with beads I can’t tell,

the wrong sort, that re-create the world
of the Sorrowful Virgin, who sees her son
die on a cross. It’s the other way round,

I want to say, cleaning, cleaning the gun.

Philip Wilson teaches French and German in a comprehensive school. He likes My Chemical Romance and film noir, has published widely in magazines and is putting together a first collection. He has recently completed an English version of a long German mediaeval poem by Philipp of Seitz, bringing in murder, mayhem and black lipstick.

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