[Rodin’s great never-completed Gates of Hell fascinates me, both in its entirety and for the renowned individual figures like The Thinker, The Shades, The Old Courtesan and, especially, The Fallen Caryatid. I also liked it for these purposes because Rodin’s sculpture started as a representation of Dante’s Inferno: today’s challenge from Rebecca was to write an ekphrastic poem: a poem about a work of art. So I tried to write a poem based on a sculpture based on a poem.]
Stone, fixed stone above me, squeezing
Me down into stone
Below me
Twisting, writhing
Stone
Men and women, demons and gods
Half-formed, straining, stretching, beseeching, reaching
Children and Shades
Squirming, thrashing
Abandon hope
[Where are my steady sisters
Standing so straight
Carrying their weights above their heads
So straight, so strong, so long
Where once I stood]
Now fallen I find myself among these struggling fallen
Francesca and her Paolo
Never then crippled
Now they coil forever in hell’s whirlwind
Ugolino and his children at dinner
Not where they eat but where they are eaten
The thinker, poet, sculptor, dreamer
Dying
Unfinished plaster cast in his studio
And my new sister
That shriveled old courtesan, the helmet-maker’s once beautiful wife
Twisted arm, poking ribs, hanging teats
Is this what I have come to? Is this where I must stay?
[Once I stood slender and strong
Surrounded by my sisters bearing our impossible loads
Our robes flowed soft in liquid stone
Our hair, thick and long, like Samson
Held our strength]
Until collapsing, crumbling, folding
Defeated I crouch forever at his gates of hell