Michaelangelo Pieta, and the prayer that is best unspoken

I didn't know this poem by C Day Lewis until I read it today. The combination of this exquisitely worked Pieta and the poignant first person poem I find breathtaking. To read the poem aloud, while looking at this image is to pray in language that takes us beyond mere words to a sense of the unspeakbale sadness at the heart of the Gospel of good news. Atonement is not a theory to argy bargy about – not argument, adoration is the disposition of the true theologian.

A dome superb as heaven's vault, capping a story

whose hero blessed the meek; a desert of floor

Refracting faith like a mirage; the orchestration

Of gold and marble engulfing the still, small voice:

You cannot pass over St Peter's and what it stands for,

Whether you see it as God's vicarious throne

Or the biggest bubble yet unpricked….

I was lost, ill at ease here, until by chance

In a side chapel we found a woman mourning

Her son: all the lacrimae rerum flowed

To her gesture of grief, all life's blood from his stone.

There is no gap or discord between the divine

And the human in that pieta of Michaelangelo.

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