Savonarola
Days leading into the Bonfire of the Vanities |
Florence kneels in lace and oil paint
Outside the Palazzo Vecchio children
sing psalms with sugar on their breath
In a room, in a cradle stuffed with rags,
a mother hides her son’s lute
Botticelli has burned his sketches
Michelangelo is gone to ground;
In Santo Spirito the Augustinians hide his crucifix.
Now the city’s colour draws towards a single spark
The square is stacked with art:
The likes of mirrors, dice;
a comb once owned by Lucretia,
A book of love poems bound in gold
The crowd leans in,
the bodies sway like wheat in a windy field. A boy weeps.
A woman crosses herself.
A torch is handed up.
Its light dances in his big-wide-open-eyes.
Artists:/Creators/Witnesses
1
I did not sleep last night
charcoal dust still clings beneath my nails,
I sketched my Magdalene with eyes like winter figs;
I hid her beneath the floorboards between old canvases and grief
2
From my window I saw a silhouette stand as if struck from iron
He raised the flame as if absolution or anything else was his to give
Do they not know what colour costs?
What it means to mix blood and ocre;
To grind lapis into light?
He preaches fire
But the eye that has seen beauty will never unsee it
He lowers the flame and writes himself into ignominy
Art:
Ladies of Arles
(Memories of the Garden at Etten)
Vincent van Gogh Date: 1888; Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France