Two Poems by Metta Sáma

What I learned from THE BIBLE                          The Movie

If women are the mules of the earth/as Zora Neale Hurston claimed once/in a fictional story/ then a woman carried Mary 100 miles/ & once there/was immediately forgotten no/water no hay no pat on the back no scratch/behind the ears the mule in the movie/was not even disabused of its not-Mary cargo/cast aside & out of the story/no name much like Lot’s wife and Sampson’s/first even the uncomplicated Joseph/the not father of Jesus/is given a name/so maybe Hurston was right & if so/let us give praise to the loads we have carried/Christ/after all would have been born/in the middle of a road thank goodness/for that mule it carried Mary/a true load/for a full hundred miles. . ./or perhaps it was a donkey/was it a donkey/maybe yes it was a donkey/if so maybe donkeys have it worse off than women

What I learned from THE BIBLE                           The Movie

Mothers get in the way a writer once said/maybe she’s right mothers/do get in the way in novels much like in the bible/Mary served her purpose and then disappeared/no death to speak of just gone/Jesus utters mother once/at least in the movie right before he dies funny/though isn’t it how God could fashion an Adam without a womb/and even more so an Eve/who as far as we know was without a uterus until she digested that fruit/unless Cain and Able were fashioned from the tongue/of a talking snake or more likely the pungent/stench of the soil that once birthed their father/yes that must be it/even then a woman’s body was in the way/much like Sarah and Hagar and all the rest/of the mothers. . . some fool/reading this will say well/what about all the absent fathers &/well. . . what of them

Metta Sáma is author of the forthcoming Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press) and author of four chapbooks, including The year we turned dragon (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). Sáma is a Senior Fellow of Black Earth Institute and on the Advisory Board of Black Radish Books.