Posts Tagged sacrifice
SUMMERS OF VIOLENCE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 26th, 2011
He came in winter, buzzing by the stove.
She fed him crumbs and butter. She was very
lonely. She liked his talk of summer,
grew perceptive as a fly. But in June,
when she still saw nothing, she squeezed her fist
and heard him scream. “I am the universal
suffering man, a sacrifice in
an empty room, reduced to a shadow
on a public wall, tearing my way
to the top in the bathhouse.” She called him
Gabriel. The night she was born bombs blitzed seeds
in her brain, a wild garden that flowered
in summers of violence.
LA PIÈTA
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 21st, 2009
St Peter's Square, Bernini's colonnades, The Basilica 1910
of the known world – of hewn porphyry,
of granite kept in its place, of usury.
Irony turns each illuminated page,
celebrates the dissemination
of the word, funds the seeding of Europe
beyond oceans, in jungle, across pampas,
over sierra. Only the clash of
vultures and the seas’ predictable tides
can erase carrion from argent sands.
How light the Saviour is! The Virgin seems
to hold him with such ambivalent ease:
a supplicant offering a sacrifice,
a rescuer carrying a corpse.
Michelangelo's Pieta, St Peter's Basilica
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