Daily Reading for March 25 • The Annunciation

When the visitor told her
there would be a child
and that she would be
overshadowed by holiness
she felt the holy darkness
that would someday become
the bringer of light.

And thirty-four years later
she stood on a hill
beneath another shadow
a high cross-bar that cut
across her and she held in
the thin air and silence
the elongated and forsaken
shadow of the holy one
she once held as a child.

She wondered as the shadows
gave way into the night
if, in time, light could pierce
like tiny nails, this absorbing dark.

“Shadowing” by Penelope Duckworth, quoted in Mary’s Hours: Daily Prayer with the Mother of God by Penelope Duckworth. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com