Humanities 1010, by Jane Ann (Devol) Fuller

Massacre of the Innocents, by Pieter Bruegel (Netherlands) 1565-1567?

Humanities 101


"The slaughtered babies [of Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s original] were painted over with details such as bundles, food and animals so that, instead of a massacre, it appeared to be a more general scene of plunder." On Massacre of the Innocents, catalogue/online entry, Royal Collection Trust


Soldiers piss against a wall. Icicles hang,
will never fall, though we will them to impale
the German mercenary who scales a barrel 
to enter the window of a fraulein’s house.

What he will ruin will remain
mystery, even today. Something original,

changed, still flames in your great-great-great
grandmother’s bed, this stein of mead, the pewter
taste of blood; today on College Green 
the bell tower’s carillon sounds

like air raid sirens in Kabul to a young man
next to me who doesn’t speak but stays behind

his medicated smile. Professor plays
A Love Supreme, and other twentieth-century

diatonic jazz. What lies beneath eventually bleeds. 
The limbs of speared infants piled,

painted over as mashed bushels of fruit,
geese you find alive and white as the down
of a baby, drawn, in this 1988 conservation 
of Bruegel’s Massacre of the Innocents.

Today, as if for the first time, I see her,
the daughter, slight as a thorn that works its way
to the surface. She reaches for her mother. 
Like the others she will be raped, quartered,

stacked against the lean-to like wood.

Jane Ann (Devol) Fuller
​
Jane Ann (Devol) Fuller's poetry appears in B O D Y, Rise Up Review, Shenandoah, Sugar House Review, The American Journal of Poetry, in the anthologies All We Know of Pleasure and Women of Appalachia Project, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize and earned her MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She co-authored Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, published with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.