Who is like God?
II
Like he just walked out of my bedroom;
there stands the statue of the archangel Michael,
in one of history’s shaded courtyards,
and he won’t let me write a poem about him,
because no one comes to Rome alone.
2. MARY
She comes among us to scatter snow,
but her flesh is warm, and mercy
is of as much interest to her as where she lives,
the weather there.
It’s of no comfort she’ll be remembered:
in good time she was blessed,
and her cells leapt forth, ran off, while
she remained
alone at home,
and now something’s growing inside her.
Not anger:
it’s male, there’s a tassel,
it’s life,
never mind God,
he’s not even her own son.
She’s vaster than the Creator,
she has a body.
Mary is struck by the unsettling feeling that
she is the very likeness of herself,
and a feathery nothing
is making a nest for the newly arrived.
And as I stroll towards her in thought,
Mary appears,
with Mary, hand in hand.
Countless voices trimming her horizon;
her sight stretches into the distance.
Until in an unguarded moment, which
might be best compared to pain,
she tears the heavens down.
Owen Good, born 1989, is a translator of Hungarian from the north of Ireland. Good's work has been published in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Dalkey Archive's Best of European Fiction, B O D Y, and Pleasure Garden among others. His translation of Krisztina Tóth's collection of short stories Pixel will be published by Seagull Books spring 2019.