Wonder

when the radio jockey played Ave Maria, just as we were hauling my grandmother's Virgin Mary statue, a recently acquired heirloom, into the living room, my mother turned into a weeping Madonna – she was petrified on the marble threshold at the very first note, at least that was what my father saw - I, on the other hand, saw a child who had just lost her mother and who now carried that statue into her house as a burden of legacy, sadness turned to stone in a bell jar, like the plant that has been living inside a sealed bottle for sixty years, ecosystem, waterless terrarium, and the man who poses with it each year I never looked for a sign in icons, or in the prophetic dreams my mother had, or that one night her mother's mother put her hand on her cheek and said hello from heaven, or that my mother said she wouldn't grow old and that that prophecy turned out to be true and that this is how that ecosystem of self-sufficient faith in a womb, and a breast, and a son who died on a cross, and a bleeding heart, healing springs, and heralding angels - and everything I don't believe in, ended up in my own house but I do believe that when my mother died, I became that child on the threshold holding on to a stone statue hoping for a miracle