Five Points Vol. 24, No. 1
Sample Content
Richard Bausch
To My Mother, Who Was Helen (1918–1985)
In Michelangelo’s Pietà,
the carved Madonna seems scarcely more
than fifteen—cradling the perfect body
of her dead son, this girl in the draped
stone cloth our eyes refuse
to believe is made of polished marble:
a girl, grieving with strangely passive
sorrow, though we have
what our faith has told us: that she knows
this that has happened is God’s will.
(The account says she held the knowledge
in her secret heart from the beginning.)
One afternoon, at the Galleria dell’Accademia
in Florence, where the great sculptor’s real David
stands in a bath of light,
I saw among the paintings on the wall of a room
beside the high-ceilinged atrium a portrait-sized
rendition by a nameless artist.
Another kind of Pietà:
Christ just down from the cross, in the grasp
of a weary woman, not young. This woman
stares, grieving, from the Renaissance
out of the vision of an ancient stranger,
the lines of the suffering face exactly depicted,
features haggard with unsupportable grief,
so clear in the middle-aged, beautiful eyes—
a gaze containing all the years of brave
love in the cruelest knowledge: that her son
must be about his father’s business, and is God.
Clearly the artist understood this deeply,
And I think, therefore, the painter must have been
a woman, Helen, very much like you,
who made, as a girl, the startling drawings
we discovered only in our late teens.
You never spoke of them or showed them,
believing, as you did, solely that you should be
the one we came to when we felt the scare of being
alive, and in nature.
. . .
You lived your years so very kindly, Helen,
and all your changelings did come home.
They are the full human answer you gave
unstintingly to Time, all making their way
in this strange life, all tending their own.
So, here is this poor poem
to you, dear lady, with love and awe,
for every line that came from sorrows
to your face, and yet were most visible when
you smiled. Brave giver, all yearning
and all beautiful—
charmer, maker, for all we do remember,
and what we didn’t know, or notice.
Love, your son.