Let Them Eat Cake?

Let ME!!!

Apr 27, 2025

I haven’t posted for a few weeks. In my March 4 post (no matter which side of the ocean you call home), I hinted that I wouldn’t attempt to speak again until I’d found my tongue. Well, I don’t think I’ve found it yet. I made a cake yesterday. Lemon with fresh blueberries. Shared it with my husband, but honestly, I ate most of it myself.

Rather than remain silent, I thought I would break—or melt--the icing, so to speak, by sharing a poem from a new anthology of poems, The Stones I Choose, written under my pen name, Marilyn Manzanita (copyright 2025, all rights reserved). In it, I take a lot of poetic license and mix up a lot of historical lore anachronously. For instance, I turn Marie Antoinette into a metaphor for spiritual hunger and Our Lady of Guadalupe as the source of spiritual nurturing. From completely different centuries and parts of the world.

Whose story is it? My voice is definitely in it. See if you can find it. Or maybe yours? How does the story strike you?

LISTENING TO THE BIRDS

There is no time like early morning

to wake without memory or care

and listen to the birds.

The image of the Virgin—Our Lady of Guadalupe—

can be seen in public and in private sanctuaries

anywhere your eyes might come to find a moment’s rest.

If I close my eyes, I can imagine her as she first appeared to Juan Diego

in early morning, without fanfare, on an otherwise deserted road,

beholding with mercy the burden he was carrying.

Forever changed, he carried her with him, her image

inexplicably emblazoned on the inside of his coat.

Even with my eyes closed, the image still burns. As I open them again,

I see all the ingredients for sweet bread come together in fleshy, doughy form,

poco a poco, kneaded and fashioned by loving hands in her diminutive image—Virgencita—

and baked in the oven as a gift to children celebrating their first communion.

No need to worry where she went, as she rapidly disappears

down their throats to fill their empty bellies with sweetness and warmth.

I know she will reappear when needed, in another form.

So, it doesn’t bother me anymore, when people go behind my back

and cluck like hens, “She wants to have her cake and eat it too.”

They don’t see that it’s impossible for me to choose.

Yes, I do want to have the whole damn cake—every single slice,

and I want to I eat all of it down to the last little bite, till finally there’s nothing left—

not even a crumb for the hens to dutifully go after.

“Let them eat cake,”
Marie Antoinette supposedly jested, when asked

what the common people would eat (before she lost her head courtesy the French Revolution). I suppose you could say she was in denial.

Close to the moment of his death, a moment that divided history into two parts--B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini), Jesus confided to his Father, “They know not what they do” (Luke 23: 34, English Revised Version).

Even in his agony, he had compassion for the people who crucified him or just stood by and watched.

If we are to believe the folklore that’s been passed down, Marie Antoinette had pity on no one—least of all herself. She could not let it in—the gravity of the situation or the devastating human need. She took no part of it into her being, not even a crumb.