Poems Pretty as a Picture, a Conversation Between Psalm 23 and Tanner, by Scott LaMascus

The Good Shepherd, by Henry Ossawa Tanner (USA) 1903

Poems Pretty as a Picture, 
a Conversation Between Psalm 23 and Tanner

The poem I need is the chiaroscuro
of something dirgey, perhaps a lament
 
or an elegy. More Carravaggio than Fragonard 
of frothy French landscape. Goya is great
 
in a museum, but wears badly over the sofa. 
Give me H.O. Tanner’s Good Shepherd
 
on a blue hillside lurking in moon’s shadows
with watchful eyes for wolves. Why did the psalmist
 
add after the syrupy twenty-third, a few poems later
something about dashing enemies’ babes on stones
 
a scandal even then, I hope? If that shepherd’s rest 
was a remembered longing, it surely 
 
became a pastoral in his palace of sleepless intrigue.
So give me no songs of pain or cries 
 
for justice not possible here. Pain breaks 
its promise by midnight, and weeds of injustice sow 
 
more seeds of despair. Anger, too, is passing relief,
the hungry soul feeding on itself. I choose

the taste of honeycomb, chewed into a ball,
dawn’s lone cloud reflecting the sun’s colors
 
like Rubens. Its bubblegum sweetness 
on my tongue exactly sentimental enough
 
to live through another day, longing again 
for night’s peace, dark hope the only poem I seek. ​

Scott LaMascus
​
Scott LaMascus is a writer in Oklahoma City and his MFA is from Antioch University in Los Angeles. His 2025 poetry chapbook, The Edited Tongue, concerns ALS or Lou Gerhig's disease, following the diagnosis and death of his father. The poems have been selected by medical-humanities journals in the UK, US and Canada and used by a top-5 hospital system in the US as part of ALS Awareness month. His debut poetry collection, Let Other Hounds, breaks silence fifty years after boyhood sexual abuse and is forthcoming in May 2026, from Fernwood Press, Newberg, Ore.