Mary's Lament at the Millenium

Know that we, your co-workers, shall grieve you...

Mary’s Lament at the Millenium

Each night the Holy Ghost chooses the best workers to visit
and lavish with fertile kisses,
and so each morning they rise,
slates wiped clean,
but for the slightest taste of dust at the back of the throat.

Each day another chance at promotion
is muffled by horns bleating at stoplights turned go-green.
A file drawer scolds open to another metal-upon-metal working day,
and that meeting with your boss is drawn and tight as your cubicle.
Soon your blood teems with daily injustices and becomes a wholly different substance.
Small stresses steep like tiny tea leaves until the black kettle shrieks,
and you’re out among the herd baaing back home.

Kneel and pray each night that every exhale
is followed by an inhale.
Let every breath breathed be miracle.
Should the Spirit one night leave you,
should you become only, only,
know that we, your co-workers, shall grieve you
and brass-plaque-remember you.
Especially, the dutiful way you arrived each day:
blessed,
dressed,
and ready for work.

The Virgin of the Dry Tree. Petrus Christus © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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Matt Layne writes…

Lord, it is hard to feel holy beneath the buzz of fluorescence and the whirr-whirr-hum of the copy machine in the next room. Mary’s Lament at the Millennium grew out of that tension, an attempt to marry divine visitation with quarterly reviews and cubicle dwelling.

I wrote the poem while working in the basement of a college building below the school’s basketball court. Summertime heat in Alabama has the tendency to turn every cinder block structure into a barbecue pit. The air was heavier than sackcloth, and every ballast in the ceiling flickered as if it were preparing to give up the proverbial ghost. The odors emanating from the damp locker rooms helped add to the sense that I was living in a 20th Century version of Hell. When I did occasionally surface from those depths each afternoon, a fiercely territorial mockingbird would dive at my head as though I had personally disparaged its religious beliefs.

One afternoon I watched a red-tailed hawk stalking a gray squirrel. The squirrel seemed acutely aware of the peril it was in. Instead of bolting, it flattened itself against the trunk of the pine tree while the hawk watched from twelve branches above. Inch by slow inch, the squirrel edged around the trunk, not away from the hawk but straight toward death, but somehow, beyond all probability, the squirrel managed to climb higher than its predator. The hawk, denied its easy lunch, lifted off in search of other prey.

Sometimes that is all we can do:

Flatten ourselves against the tree. March toward death. Merge into the bleating traffic. Wake up blessed, get dressed, and wander back into the work of another gray squirrel day.

Keep climbing, y’all.

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“Mary’s Lament at the Millenium” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022. The music is “Sparkle Nine” from Ned Mudd.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us.

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

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Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet’s nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. His debut multimedia poetry collection, Miracle Strip, had been awarded the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry and was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. Order your copy today.

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