Pieta
A mother, her son who must
move a mountain for love.
a dark and dried-up body,
a withered thorny crown,
an esoteric visual of grief.
Gold plated halo, where are her
well-worn and mighty wings?
How long has she prayed?
How raw are her knees?
Make no adjustment of His body,
let His limbs hang as He did.
Holding onto to holiness
under her fingernails, filed
down from gripping
everything she loved.
Holding Him as if he’s more than
an ugly raw-boned carpenter’s son
with an unwieldy conscious
observed by those who’ve faced
those unspeakable grievous words,
It is finished.
My main goal of this poem was to focus more on Mary than Jesus. The idea that Jesus was a son of Mary instead of just the son of God was really interesting to me. The painting felt like it was showing deep emotions about the grief of a mother who has lost her first born child. So, I wanted to focus on the more emotional side of what the painting depicted. I focused a little bit on describing some features of the painting. For example, lines 6, 11, and 19 – 23 are all direct references to the things I saw in the painting. I also chose to capitalize the pronouns used to refer to Jesus because in the Bible, the capitalization of words like “Lord” and “Father” symbolizes holiness and sets God and Jesus apart from each other. I also tried to use words that had a negative or upsetting connotation to represent the sadness that was shown in the painting. I ended it with “it is finished” because those are said to be the last words of Jesus when he was dying on the cross.
I am so in love with this poem. I wrote mine with religious tones as well, and I am in awe of your take on this work. By humanizing religious figures, Mary as a mother and not just the mother of Christ, even greater depth is brought to the art you chose. Christ’s death was not only a loss of a figure but a son, and your stylistic and diction choices managed to connect the poem to both the painting and the original, textual context, making it highly recognizable as well as impactful. This is such an important niche to me, so it’s super cool that you wrote about it 🙂