Ave, María
by Sandy Ayer
Ave, María by Sandy Ayer “Ave, ave,” soar the stereo boy-voices as I hang the blue-robed Virgen and her naked Niño from the top of the tree. A cubit below the fatherless Holy Family, I tether their tin burro to a branch. The mother and child are all of a piece, a single piece of cutout hammered metal wrought by the peasant hands and fingers of the Oaxaca women’s cooperative, where seven summers ago we bought this ornament and fifty others, mostly birds. I hang them according to a sacred Advent hierarchy of glory of my own devising: Just as star differs from star in glory, so does bird from bird. First, those aves of transcendent beauty: quetzals, hummingbirds, trogons, with real-life names like “Elegant,” “Resplendent,” “Magnificent.” Lower down, I hang the swallows, and I remember that the Spanish word, golondrina, also means “prostitute,” and that El Niño became the friend of prostitutes and sinners. I recall also the legend of the swallows who appeared to José in a dream, crying “Ay, ay, take your family and fly, fly, for Herod is seeking to kill all the niños of the pueblo;” and I wonder for a moment if I should give the swallows a more exalted place. No, for all their noble associations they remain outwardly unremarkable, although their dancing flight must please the Holy Child. “I know all the aves of the air,” says the Lord somewhere in the Psalms, and later on bids us reflect upon their carefree unawareness of their beak to crop existence. No worries, as even the most endangered receive their food from God and make their every flight an ascension in miniature, a presumption of resurrection, a union of earth and heaven. Indeed, the Creator has made them a little lower than the angels, you might say, which is why I’ve set the most glorious just below a ring of six tin angels who serenade the holy Mother and Child with trumpet blasts and cries of “ave, ave, ave.”
Sandy Ayer is director of library services emeritus at Ambrose University in Calgary, Alberta. He birds for excitement and reads to relax. Sandy has been writing poetry since just after the turn of the millennium. His poetry has been published in Crux and Alberta Views.
