Woman Pursued by Dragon Flees into the Desert
She’d always loved the word
‘immaculate’, until they explained.
Even after Gabriel, it wasn’t clear
this was a permanent commitment.
Not just a virgin but The Virgin.
The hydra-headed dragon
came to her door at night.
She smelled corruption on its breath
and pitied it, its skin scored
with self-loathing,
its terrible amour with death.
She looked it in the eyes, saw
herself: a tinselled effigy;
her Eternal Life sentence
a juggernaut of pain and terror.
She ran out of the town,
into the clean silence of the desert.
How many desperate decades of the rosary
reeled backwards to her then;
countless pleas for intercession.
She saw she was to star
in a two-thousand year long tragedy,
a non-speaking part.
That timeless trap, the allure
of making all the difference …
And though the khamsin whispered
tears … miracles … make nothing happen,
she stopped running. Across the sand
the creature crawled to drag her into history.
Carole Satyamurti
published in Magma
.JPG)
