THE ANGEL GABRIEL

Wake.

                                III 
                          
                            GABRIEL

Mary, in a dream of love

Playing as all children play,

For unsuspecting children may

Express in comic make—believe

The wish that later they will know

Is tragic and impossible;

Hear, child, what I am sent to tell:

Love wills your dream to happen, so

Love’s will on earth may be, through you,

No longer a pretend but true.

 

                          MARY

What dancing joy would whirl

My ignorance away?

Light blazes out of the stone,

The taciturn water

Bursts into music, and warm wings throb within

the motionless rose:

What sudden rush of Power

Commands me to command?

 

                        GABRIEL

When Eve, in love with her own will,

Denied the will of Love and fell,

She turned the flesh Love knew so well

To knowledge of her love until

Both love and knowledge were of sin:

What her negation wounded, may

Your affirmation heal to-day;

Love’s will requires your own, that in

The flesh whose love you do not know,

Love’s knowledge into flesh may grow.

Wake.

 

                      MARY

My flesh in terror and fire

Rejoices that the Word

Who utters the world out of nothing,

As a pledge of His word to love her

Against her will, and to turn

Her desperate longing to love,

Should ask to wear me,

From now to their wedding day,

For an engagement ring.

 

                     GABRIEL

Since Adam, being free to choose,

Chose to imagine he was free

To choose his own necessity,

Lost in his freedom, Man pursues

The shadow of his images:

Today the Unknown seeks the known;

What I am willed to ask, your own

Will has to answer; child, it lies

Within your power of choosing to

Conceive the Child who chooses you.