“Credo” by Roz Spafford

Roz Spafford

CREDO

from “The Gospel According to Mary”

Look for me among the missing—

the lost ones

their bones thrown—

Look for me in the shadows,

light taken from light,

true god from true god, begetting—

Look for me in disguise

as the dove, the Ghost who holds

the place I’ll never own.

* * *

I am the thing invisible—

the missing other

in plain sight.

Father, son and—not mother?

Who: the giver of life?

Who: the maker of flesh?

The Trinity, broken:

Two men and a ghost.

* * *

Re-dream history:

Who would have survived

if God had been whole?

God the family, not

the father. The prophets speaking

in the mother’s voice.

In more than one: Church,

child, creed, I believe.

In the remaining grace, I believe.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Roz Spafford: “My life-long argument with God—where have you been? why do you permit such suffering?—culminated when I began to write a series of poems in Mary’s ‘voice.’ I had tried rejecting God entirely—as a teenager, I had attempted to become ‘unsaved’ by standing on the cliffs overlooking the ocean shouting, ‘I renounce you,’ three times. It was a kind of temper-tantrum. With the Mary poems, I used another strategy: rewriting the Gospels. That I have not yet been struck dead for hubris offers ambiguous evidence—for a God who is generous, disinterested or absent. Still, why would one argue with God if he/she were not there to be argued with?” (website)