Winner of The PERSONALSAVIORLORDJESUSCHRIST Poetry Contest

Promises Had Been Made 

          

The women hide nothing.

She, captured in 

         accusation,

a collaborative creator.

Her envelopment has no meaning

         to a dead man

         whose death won’t 

         even end death.

Promises had been made.

Would that be me in her arms?

Not me here on 

         a bench in the gallery’s center

         squaring off

with loneliness and imagination, 

         both being among art’s disciples.

But some me – with a body 

         almost human as his.

         I know much of everything 

         but not enough.

An other Mary, 

         head lowering to his arm – 

         his conjuration of a once life

                    – touching but for

the confident artist’s oils of

         celestial buoyancy.

The men are concerned in their way,

         eyes averted from mine.

         I’m no Mary.

Loyal middle-management, they deny

the present’s threat of pain, 

         the present’s carry-through.

He is translucent in her arms,

         an embodied splay of 

         too much beauty to be real.

_____
Sarah Sarai. 2017. 
Winner of The PERSONALLORDSAVIORJESUSCHRIST Poetry Contest 2017, sponsored by Chris Rice Cooper. Chosen by Helen Losse, emeritus editor at The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature journal. Ekphrastic: Based on The Entombment by Moretto de Besco, at the Met.