Artemisia Gentileschi Haunts the Musee des Beaux Arts, by Isabel Cristina Legarda

Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, by Artemisia Gentileschi (Italy) 1638-39

 
Artemisia Gentileschi Haunts the Musee des Beaux Arts
 
About suffering they are completely wrong,
those leery old men. They lull us into believing
people are dullards, like cattle chewing their cud.
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance, the ploughman,
head down, appears unaware of the plummeting youth,
oblivious to the screaming loss, perhaps indifferent.
But look again: he bows his head because he hears
the scream, the water’s splash, and cannot bear to look.
No one’s as oblivious as they pretend.
 
When I testified at my rapist’s trial,
they knew;
when they put the Sibille cords around my fingers
and pulled tighter and tighter to crush them,
using torture as proof of my word,
they knew: È vero è vero è vero è vero!

My self-portraits in the aftermath encipher 
the vengeance of my survival:
I wear my enemy’s shrunken head around my neck;
I am Salome, Lucretia, Judith, Jael,
fleshy, unsmiling, taking up space,
doing what the cowardly world would not.
I’ll show you, my illustrious lordships,
what a woman can do.
 
But after four hundred years 
the world has not learned.
The torture of women in courtrooms continues.
Rapists sit on the highest court,
Holofernes and Shechem born again,
but the person who’s grilled is the woman who excels,
Susanna persecuted by the elders,
a shining sun despite their shade.
You can’t tell me the ploughmen cannot hear
or see; yet everyone sails calmly on
in their delicate, expensive ships, eating crumpets
while Dinah gets raped,
waiting for Judith to save her own hide
while the passive scratch their behinds on a tree.
 
Icaruses are bound to fall and fracture
placid surfaces, plunge into the cold shock
of their own mediocrity. We’ll be ready,
tent pegs and hammers in hand, to lean forward
calmly to drive our point home,
radiant as the sun burning over the sea.

Isabel Cristina Legarda

Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the U.S. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in America, Ruminate, Smartish Pace, FOLIO, and others. 

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlands) 1558