This poem was commended in the top 10 of the National Poetry Competition 2022, out of 17,800 entries

The Boisterous Sobbings of Margery Kempe

And if she cries it’s because her blood is thin,

the marrow sucked from her bones by fourteen children.

If she doesn’t sleep, it’s because God circles

her quarried pelvis like a buzzard, folds her over

like a prayer, pours her to the ground as if she’s made

of water. If she falls out of herself, into herself,

repeats herself like a canticle, Christus amor meus est,

it’s because the light of the world sits on her bed,

lets her know who she was before she splintered

into pieces. If mud spatters her skirt, if her head

is blue from banging on the ground, it’s because

she knows the weight of love, the weight of a man hanging,

his body pulling down the sky, the world’s suffering

pressing on his scalp like an inverted pyramid. If she rolls

in church aisles for priests to stumble over, it’s because

their tongues are yellow with butter and do not speak

silence. If she grieves before bishops at Ely Cathedral,

it’s because she’s heard a girl in France has been set alight

for hearing sacred voices. If she accrues wealth in her mill

and brewery, it’s to buy chastity from her husband,

servants for her children, travel to Spain, Jerusalem,

Rome. If she cries over a splinter of wood from Calvary,

it’s because this is a tree that has touched a man

with holes in his hands. And if she sobs before

Julian of Norwich, it’s because she feels herself believed

at last by a woman who knows God is not a noun

but a verb: the very act of causing, doing, birthing,

dying, loving, weeping, smiling, falling, rising. Everything.