Blessing for a Birth

By Jennifer Ferraro

What shall we call you,
one who comes across a vast distance
bearing secrets of the future, your mother’s hidden wishing
and the remembrance of Beauty that hung diffusely in the air
all those long years without you?
We call you the awaited one, the dreamt of one, the sung one,
for we sing to you now a symphony of welcomes
and a wish for your smooth passage to this world.
As if you were sweet basil, as if you were mountain rosemary,
as if you were the golden sweetness of the apple and the pear
at harvest time—you sweeten your mother’s innermost heart
and ripen her for ever greater Mystery…
For she has kissed the hem of the most Beloved
in calling you forth, sheltering a wild faith in life
in the darkness of her belly.
Like a rose folded inward, hiding great fragrance,
like a host watching over the sleep of the most cherished guest,
the Mother—that unseen presence which attends and nurtures
living things, that holds all things in beingness.
Little one, we sing to you now,
calling you joy, calling you promise fulfilled, calling you
sheer vastness and little drop of honey—
Join us here, and your earthly journey will be cloaked
with songs and praises evermore.
Your mother’s vast heart, deepening as she awaits you,
every tear she’s ever shed for God gathering and intensifying,
for you, little drop of honey,
coming across great distances, just to see her face at last,
just to gaze upon the face of Love at last.

©Jennifer Ferraro, 2007- All rights reserved.

Blessing for the Ending of Relationship

By Jennifer Ferraro

When you know it is time to go,
you have not been less beautiful—

And have not tread a false path from light
to darkness, I promise—

nothing was or ever will be wasted:

All that you gave, all that you received
of the vast and changing reservoir
for which I can give no name—
remains whole in you, yours, eternal.

I don’t want to lie
This is no time for platitudes…
I would say it is love, but from light to
light I have never known what it is
that makes us want to go blind,
to be cradled in that warm womb
the heart was made to long for;

And because you are going
and must go
does not mean it was a lie,
that you did not want correctly,
or your tender embraces were tainted
by some shameful shadow need;

Because it is time to go
does not mean you were never loved…
that love never existed or failed;
but only that the cup was filled
and what could nourish did nourish;

And you will live—

It is life itself
irrepressibly speaking, through long tunnels
from the black pit of fear toward that spot
in your heart that is spring freshness, rebirth
and the shedding of ways you have outgrown;

Never berate yourself, never bludgeon that good
and tender bud of your loving that was loved…
and that gave what it could, as it could,
and was received as the other could receive—

for that was beautiful and was not all wrong—

And you are as good as you once thought you were,
and the other is as good, and things are not as
they were hoped to be and the last stop has been reached—

You are forgiven, you are forgiven
everything you did or didn’t do, gave or couldn’t give;

Hope is the hardest to give up… the last gift
you shall give to each other as you go,
as you must go, and bestow upon your Love
and the one it loved that precious parting gift—

just as the pain of delivery and the closeness of death
ends in astonishment… with the first breath.

© Jennifer Ferraro, 2002—All rights reserved.