Pieta
It never happened like this.
Mary's beauty is young, her brow pristine,
her adult son draped across her knees.
She slips her hand beneath his right shoulder,
adjusts that ponderous weight, his head thrust back,
ghastly ribs pronounced.
On her lips, serene containment.
No unseemly howls of grief, no gnashing of teeth
at the fruit of her womb stiffened into a corpse.
Marble, smooth and white
as an elephant's tusk, erases Calvary's filth,
its blood and spit.
For the sculptor, death is simply material;
the reality of it so mundane,
so temporal.
His Madonna whispers to us
about what endures: a mother, a son,
his body blending back seamlessly into hers.
– claire keyes