Our Lady of Guadalupe – given to me by the poet Grevel Lindop
For today’s poem in my Anthology from Canterbury Press Waiting on the Word we return to the poet Grevel Lindop with an honest meditation on a visit to Mexico entitled ‘For our Lady of Guadelupe. You can hear me read this poem by clicking on the title or the play button. After the Waiting on the Word anthology was published, for which Grevel had kindly given me permission to include this poem, we met up and he gave, as a gift the image he had bought on his visit and which is part of the subject of the poem and of my reflections on it. I was very moved by the gift and the little statue sits on my desk, so as Linda had not done an image for today I have included a photo of it here. As I wrote about that statue in the commentary:
We know too, from this first verse, that this mind-changing journey is one the poet himself has to make himself. Those lines,
where I will buy her plastic image later –
garish, I hope, and cheap,
are highly significant, implying that when he first arrived he might have disdained the stalls of plastic images. It is only after his actual encounter with Our Lady of Guadalupe that he understands their value and comes back to buy one….What we learn on the journey of this poem is that the devotion of the poor may transfigure cracked and broken, even poor and shoddy material more effectively than the finesse and fine taste of the sceptical rich
You can find the whole of my short reflective essay on this poem in Waiting on the Word, which is now also available on Kindle As always you can hear me read the poem by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button
For Our Lady of Guadelupe
The taxi windscreen’s broken,
lightning-starred with a crack from one corner:
signature of a stone from the Oaxaca road.
It drops me by the shanty-town of stalls
where I will buy her plastic image later –
garish, I hope, and cheap,
for kitsch is authenticity.
A jagged rift of space
splits the old basilica’s perfect Baroque,
an intricately-cracked stone egg
atilt on sliding subsoil where the Aztec
city’s lake was carelessly filled in.
Crowds pass its listing shell without a glance,
heading for the concrete-and-stained-glass
swirl that mimics
Juan Diego’s cloak, where she appeared
and painted her own image on the fabric
to show sceptical bishops
how perfect love could visit a poor Indian
after the wars, and fill his cloak with roses.
Now the cloak’s under glass behind the altar.
A priest celebrates Mass,
but we walk round the side
to queue for the moving pavement that will take us closer,
its mechanical glide into the dark
floating us past the sacred cloth
and her miraculous, soft, downcast gaze:
not Spanish and not Indian but both,
lovely mestiza Virgin, reconciler
who stands against the flashbulbs’ irregular
pizzicato of exploding stars,
and while we slide on interlocking steel
opens for us her mantle, from which roses
pour and pour in torrents, like blood
from a wound that may never be healed.
Malcolm Guite 