Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: The Pieta

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

By my count, this is the 108^th post I have made toward the Moristotle & Co. collection. Most of them I have been very proud of, and yet there is one that I always wanted to take back and redeem the pieces that were highlighted within during their infancy.
    The piece was an exercise in jump-starting my creative mind by playing with several photographic prompts (“Waiting for a Trailer,” April 7, 2021). By no means did I consider those pieces fine poetry, but I always wanted to go back and do something with them if I could.
    Since I have come off the truck, I have been re-editing and typing pieces into my computer in an attempt to finally publish my first real collection, possibly two—more on that hopefully at a later date. To keep up with the schedule I was trying to with my posts, many poems never got moved from my phone drafting app into a formal document, so I have been taking a lot of time catching up.
    I have finally circled back to that post and it’s seven admittedly subpar pieces.

The Pieta

    Today’s poem was inspired by the Michelangelo Buonarroti creation commonly referred to as “The Pieta” and now enshrined within Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Officially called “Madonna della Pietà,” it is a large marble sculpture of Mary holding her dead son in her arms. Pieta translates from Italian as “feel pity for.” The statue brings to mind the pain many parents have experienced in having to bury their children.
    What caught my attention in reading up on The Pieta was a story of a man named Laszlo Toth, who in 1972 attacked the sculpture with a geologist’s hammer shouting, “I am Jesus Christ; I have risen from the dead!”

Lazlo Toth

Laszlo being subdued by the crowd
immediately after his attack

    Laszlo struck the sculpture between 12 and 15 times, breaking off Mary’s nose, chipping at her eyelid, and breaking her arm off at the elbow. He was dragged away to spend a few years in an Italian psychiatric hospital and was eventually deported. The people who were gathered at the statue at the time took the chips as souvenirs, but most were returned to help repair the sculpture.
    In looking at the original three stanzas, I saw that I had just barely mentioned Laszlo’s attack, and now I wanted to expand on it.
    Here is the result, including lines of my best Italian (with translation):

The Pieta

Mamma! (Momma)
Sono io! (It’s me)
Sono risorto! (I have risen)
Non piangere più! (Do not mourn anymore)
Non piangere! (Do not cry)

With the first swing
I chipped off a tear,
with the second
I broke off the run in her nose,
stopped the marble cry,
chipped away at the
blubbering of grief,
but she kept holding him,
this stone image made
of my previous form.

Mamma!
Sono io!
Sono risorto!

It is a pity
that one who should not
has had to mourn the wounds,
has had to bear the bones,
the lifeless form of the child
she carried to life,
cared for as he grew,
before anyone else knew.

Non piangere più!
Non piangere!

A pity!
No one should have to mourn
for those who have come forth
from the loins,
nor hold themselves together
as that precious life
bleeds away in their arms.

Non sono Laszlo! (I’m not Laszlo)
Sono il risorto (I am the risen)
Sono il Cristo! (I am the Christ)
Gesù tuo figlio! (Jesus your son)

A pity
she still bears that life bled,
the one pierced by spear and nails,
even my hammer—
twelve blows to say I have risen
as they dragged her son away
to preach to the insane.

With my last blow,
I broke away her arm,
took the support from
the marble mass
of what I was,
of what I am no more.

Mamma!
Sono risorto!
Non piangere!

Copyright © 2023 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.