Are We Not All Angels?
Angels by Anthony Trott
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Angels by Anthony Trott |
The Angel with the Broken Wing
I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.
The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.
Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.
I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.
I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.
For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.
There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.
~ BY DANA GIOIA
When I read this I immediately thought of the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., The Sacred Made Real which highlighted Spain's mostly wooden sculptures that leave the churches once a year for Holy Week clad in real clothing and are venerated as they are carried thru the streets during the week.
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Mater Dolorosa Roldan. Our Lady of Sorrows (Mater Dolorosa) by Pedro Roldán |
This poem reminded me of that day, of that exhibit, of that profound emotion which was beyond religion, beyond gender or race or creed or station.....
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Gregorio Fernández, Dead Christ (detail), 1625-30, © Photo Imagen M.A.S. Courtesy of Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid |
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Pedro de Mena (1628–1688) | Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo) |
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