When Mary said to Jesus, “There’s no wine.
They have no wine,” she told him, “This is it:
Your hidden life is over. Now acquit
the glory you’ve been given. Time to shine.”
And Jesus said to her, “My time is mine.
I’ll do a miracle when I see fit,”
then, trusting to his blessed mother’s wit,
the choicest vintage earth has seen divined.
And Mary treasured in her heart that then
the world would never be the same again.
And we who to our hidden life hold fast,
afraid of where God’s grace might bid us go,
must, heeding Mary, let our lives be cast
into a world whose wine is running low.
Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, U.S. Catholic, Amethyst Review, The Society of Classical Poets, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is a certified catechist in the Archdiocese of New York and editor of the Catholic Poetry Room.