Anne Lovejoy
Why I am Not the Virgin Mary
(The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli 1486)
This young woman kept a tidy kitchen.
There is a place for everything and everything she had is ordered in it:
Candlestick, storage jar, six plates next to a flask
lined up ready on the dust free shelf.
Things in my kitchen constantly surprise me
turning up in cupboards unannounced,
like the three jars of dried herbs, all out of date.
Mary grew herbs in pots on windowsill and balcony.
Glossy green leaves of Bay and Basil are not
akin to the thirst tortured spider plant or fading Christmas Chrysanths
that brave my house.
Her bed was immaculate: ordered velvet cover, gold bordered, precisely stacked
cushions, chaste white linen.
No tousled duvet with hastily discarded pyjamas peeping out.
The only pure white linen I possess comes in a perfume bottle
and I dab it behind my ears.
Most of all the curtains give me away –
Hers were red Italian brocade with a border which is not wonky.
They are stitched to hang perfectly straight
and she had clearly mastered tie-backs.
My new curtains are in patches and I doubt bleached hessian
will hang in such an elegant fashion
Anyone who reflects on Crivelli’s painting can see that she is a paragon of
womanly virtue.
We are worlds and time apart.
But; there are two books casually left on her kitchen shelf too
and in the moment that God touched her, she was reading.
Page(s) 19
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The