Here is a poem by James Crenner:
The "Rondanini Pieta," Michelangelo's Final (And Unfinished) Sculpture
The legs are buckled delicately
under the slumping weight of the dead Christ.
The woman's face is half erased with grief.
Michelangelo was still a young, robust,
believing man when he first hit upon this theme--
this "Pieta" with sorrowful mother
and dead son--and he carved it over
and over again throughout his life,
as if it never could be over with.
Or as if to say, "This is not anyone
in particular. This a statue
of the stricken universe one day holding
the corpse of the world in her arms."
What a lonely, ecstatic secret
it must have been, to love
extinction as tenderly as this man did
who changed the marble into smoke.
Through the insubstantial flesh
of these stone ghosts, we can see
the plain walls of the museum, and one another
circling, grieving and circling.
One of my favorite brief poems by Donald Justice:
On A Picture By Burchfield
Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours.
Already your agony has outlasted ours.
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