Ave, María

“Ave, ave,” soar the stereo boy-voices
as I hang the blue-robed Virgen
and her naked Niño
from the top of the tree.
A cubit below the fatherless Holy Family, I tether
their tin burro to a branch.
The mother and child are all of a piece,
a single piece of cutout hammered metal
wrought by the peasant hands
and fingers of the Oaxaca women’s cooperative,
where seven summers ago we bought this
ornament
and fifty others, mostly birds.

I hang them
according to a sacred Advent hierarchy of glory
of my own devising:
Just as star differs from star in glory,
so does bird from bird.
First, those aves of transcendent beauty:
quetzals, hummingbirds, trogons,
with real-life names like “Elegant,” “Resplendent,”
“Magnificent.”

Lower down, I hang the swallows, and
I remember that the Spanish word, golondrina,
also means “prostitute,” and that El Niño
became the friend of prostitutes and sinners.
I recall also the legend of the swallows
who appeared to José in a dream, crying
“Ay, ay, take your family and
fly, fly, for Herod is seeking to kill
all the niños of the pueblo;”
and I wonder for a moment
if I should give the swallows a more exalted place.
No, for all their noble associations
they remain outwardly unremarkable,
although their dancing flight must please the Holy Child.

“I know all the aves of the air,” says the Lord
somewhere in the Psalms,
and later on bids us reflect
upon their carefree unawareness
of their beak to crop existence.
No worries, as even the most endangered
receive their food from God

and make their every flight an ascension
in miniature,
a presumption of resurrection,
a union of earth and heaven.
Indeed, the Creator has made them
a little lower than the angels,
you might say,
which is why I’ve set the most glorious
just below a ring of six tin angels
who serenade the holy Mother and Child
with trumpet blasts
and cries of “ave, ave, ave.”

This poem previously appeared in Traces.