The Rondanini Pietà This would be the other one, the one an artist sculpts at the end, when life can clearly be deciphered, the cloud of false starts and anger and failure finally settling. His first was so “perfect” so “done.” This so naked in its faults (an arm left hanging where a fuller Christ had been, Mary barely scraped from the stone) can only be by one who knows the hollowness of surfaces. Spare and vertical (compared to the slab-like corpse of the first), this one seems so vulnerable. No sensuous beauty, gawky fact – it takes a mother’s care to hold him gently up. She’s lost in grief, hunched, but strong enough to heft a body. Like some marvellous eclipse, her shadows tent what might soon be. Death? Yes, for Michelangelo. But more. Thomas Holahan Thomas Holahan has conducted poetry workshops in Boulder, Colorado and Berkeley, California. Often his poetry takes on the quest for the transcendent in the ordinary world. He has recently been published in the journal Presence. Currently he leads the poetry collective Poets@StPauls in New York City.
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July 2025
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