The Inquisitor’s Instructions to Paolo Veronese, by Stephen Bunch

Feast in the House of Levi, by Paolo Veronese (Italy) 1573

The Inquisitor’s Instructions to Paolo Veronese

Replace the dog with Mary Magdalene.
And all the Germans must go.
If not, it’s the auto-da-fe for you.

The drunkards, the fools, the freaks
we’ll allow. Venice is liberal
with its last suppers,
as was our Lord with His.

But you argue your art is joyous praise,
no product of thought. Precisely.

Heresies bloom in light and colour.
The dog and the Germans must go.

Stephen Bunch

Stephen Bunch lives and writes in Lawrence, Kansas, where he received the 2008 Langston Hughes Award for Poetry from the Lawrence Arts Center and Raven Books. His poems can be found in Autumn Sky Poetry, The Literary Bohemian, Fickle Muses, IthacaLit, Mudlark, and others. From 1978 to 1988, he edited and published Tellus, a little magazine that featured work by Victor Contoski, Edward Dorn, Jane Hirshfield, Donald Levering, Denise Low, Paul Metcalf, Edward Sanders, and many others. After a fifteen-year hibernation, he awoke in 2005 and resumed writing. Preparing to Leave, his first gathering of poems, was published in 2011 and Transmissions from Bone House, his second, in 2016. Bunch can be found on the Map of Kansas Literature near L. Frank Baum and Gwendolyn Brooks. [He reports that property values tanked when he moved into the neighbourhood.]