There is Mary Magdalene, there in the garden,
whispering to wasps and wind-
blown cotton; she’s dark, a
miraculous blue-black black, that in
the South they call anyone like that,
‍Blue.

Her hair, well, you know,
women and hair; she, loved
the delicate tension of black curl
awaiting moisture.
Living in the East, with rainfall and heat--He
loved it, her hair, a weathervane
of locks, He’d say.

He loved her all.

Of love, what do we really know?
She, a woman, simply asked:
‘Is the flesh a temple, or
a place of bones…?”  

Yes. Because once, her
own body was owned—

her face and body someone’s finger-scrape; until, until…

His brown hand circled her wrist.

The men had gathered, from compass
points; the bells in town loosened
their tongues. Air turned the color of turquoise.
The color of Magdalene’s dress.

And to those, rocks and ropes frothing in their hands,
He cried out:  “who is without sin, throw
the first stone” meaning at her, and,
what she would always remember, remember to the end of her days

as she moved North, to fire escapes and tar streets, was,

that He knelt on the ground, and with His
finger, wrote, and what He wrote vanished
into wind and sand,

and never looking up,
never
threw the stone.

‍