Four After Caravaggio, by Lauren Delapenha

Ecce Homo, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italy) 1609

​Ecce Homo

Look—you cannot look
away from what you’ve been told
is a man. This piece of work,
 
this lost Caravaggio, sold
into oblivion, now hangs on view
in state, alone, in Spain. The room is cold.
 
This beautiful linkage—Gentile, Gentile, Jew,
bound in the embrace that all men make
before they do what they’ve been told to do--
 
will break when the Roman, who still takes
his stairs in twos, hesitates to drape 
the royal shroud across Christ’s back to make
 
the joke stick, or stop the wounds, agape,
from shining. Be gentle. He is a man, yes, 
but young, and unaccustomed to the shape
 
of these proceedings.

The Denial of Saint Peter, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italy) 1610

​The Denial
 
Simon, Simon, Satan
demanded to have you
that he might sift you
like wheat
 
I.
The servant girl sees 
as he sits in the light, not for light, 
but for heat, and she says,
When he speaks, he gives himself 
away--
 
II.
The falling saint shifts his gaze 
to the fire beyond the frame.
By this light-dark they caught him,
the soldier and the servant,
and he turned his hands inward, the faint
smell of scales still on them,
as if to do the old work,
the terrible work,
of hauling in a net.
 
III.
The rooster we do not see
accuses the darkness of a dawn
we cannot see
and so, anonymous, we
sit and wait outside
and shun sleep
to see the end,
but mostly to keep warm.

IV.
And it was night, still, when He 
turned and looked at me when I 
was not far off--
about a stone’s throw away, and I 
don’t know if it was the knowing 
or the morning in His eye, 
why I, too, went out, 
and wordless, wept.
 
V.
After the murder,
fleeing for his life to Rome,
Caravaggio painted a man
called Simon called Peter
pointing to himself
smothered in shadows to belie
the new tremor in his eye and in his hand.
 
VI.
Behold, the man.
The weakness is in the hands.
 
VII.
The fallen saint hangs 
in a corner of the Met—sold
from hand to hand,
the caption says,
to pay a debt.
 

The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italy) 1601

Of All Things Seen
 
Light costs two euro.
In the corner, Caravaggio
does the thing he does with light
on the stripped form 
of Peter, a favourite, beginning 
to die. Someone pays, as someone
always does in front of pretty things.
I, being Protestant, protest
by looking away, but not for long--
I have long been transfixed 
by slaughter, or rather, unable 
as I am to look anything I consume
in the eye, by the image of slaughter, 
by its slanting. This is the preferred angle 
of angels, saying, singing, Do not be 
afraid. Money. The light, again. 
It does not occur to me to like it. 
I follow the saint’s line 
of sight, past the new astonishment 
of the stake in his hand, his head inclined
in the beatific tradition of the beaten
toward the one with the hand and hammer, 
raised like your hand
in the final letter where you declined
to write my name, the same
as raising a palm to stroke a face
or strike it.

​**

And Unseen
 
This is not a poem
about crucifixion--
the nails are already in--
but rather, the inveterate art
of doing what must be done. 
Consider the labourer propping up the cross.
One needs help to die
to self. He will go home, the faceless man
on whose back this device depends, and, 
as an afterthought, turn the neck
of the small chicken in the yard, 
set it upside down, and wait. 
 
Lauren Delapenha
 
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart nomination. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.