Of Two Pietas
That year in Florence, walkways moved
passed the mother and child,
the mother bent over her fallen child,
much as the time we were carried
passed the glass coffin on Red Square.
But there, someone had said,
is he wax
to look so perfectly preserved? Which
sorrows migrate to the poet’s
mind
out of their fragmented fields, created
as much as remembered?
Before her
there was a bulletproof pane of glass,
her fragile features had been
spray painted
once, and then, smashed. The iconoclast
himself a child of the
times. Now
her innocence had lost it equilibrium,
both art and artifact were
gone, love
grafted on an act of violence.
Her complexion turned to stone.
I had known another of equal beauty.
She rode a cart through the streets
of Cuzco,
her darker skin truer to the East,
her red dress catching fire
in the sun.
It was she who bled for the people
and the people who had bled for
her.
Milk mixed with blood. I was younger then,
and it was harder to
remember. Unlike
the art of Michelangelo, her features
were complete. She was carried
from church to church in celebration,
through
narrow streets, all day riding the rough
pallet on shoulders. And
she was made
of wood, the natural capital of fire.
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