Michelangelo's Lament........Between The Pietas Poem by John Tansey

I

Between the Pietas;
stone markers measuring the miles
of a life's work, in which lay the lie
I could not rework, nor explain,
but of a will, no longer mine,
bequeath the church to claim as shrine

When in youth, truth was white
pulsing within the veins of venetian marble,
I chiseled away
with the hammer of God
and an artist’s honest labor,
to etch the feminine face,
of empathy, amid her posture of stone.

Proclaiming, devoutly, of good and evil
refined in the hand tooled edge of shadow and light,
I placed a dead God,
in the lap of his mother,
and shaped mercy in the face of Mary
her head bowed, toward the shrouded sorrow….

As the church prayed and angels knelt in the wings.
II

Now, at life’s end, doubting church and man;
half-blind in art’s hope, yet glimpsing
the shrouded shadows of brutality
papal hypocrisy and its impoverished peasantry;
and the pooled delusions of an old man,
I take up awl and chisel, again
and kneel before this monolithic prayer stone
hoping to etch her grace once again

Once, such fine lines of smooth stone,
palm-cupped curves expressing passion
and hand tooled sense of virtue,
now give way, to these vague clumps
of unshaped clay, blunted by thick thumbs

Eyes, hands and faith numbed,
losing art to life and in it, the end of both
I stopped my work, dropping hammer and chisel
saw the truth in the statue’s unfinished
and the sculptures’ natural erosion,
and within the stone I left them

As plagued peasants reposed in death, and angels fled the Sistine.