Venice masks

Saturday 26 October 2024

Wooden Sculpture from the Sixteenth Century - João Miguel Fernandes Jorge

The father, the son, missing only the holy spirit.
maybe for this reason this Trinity in the museum of Angra
emits most passionately an aura of the divine Nazarene.
The father cradles the son and we can almost hear their conversation
in a church near the sea—immense is the light in in the Jewish
Port, the blue of its narrow bay. those who travel for
from their homeland disappear. In the houses, fires are lit. The
ancient place, its rocks so beloved that the eye
always comes to rest on them—those who travel far
return no more. Death deserves the son, transmitted by
the father; this is the life that leads to the other life. The ash
deserves the opposite, the reward for a
much tattered body: the spirit is absent,
it was stolen. What remains is the belief in blood and in martyrdom,
it remains the soul; and nothing his son's hand beyond his death
is the hand of the father, ripping through the gold and green of his robe
I see no difference between that and other hand that holds, not
the punished hand of the son, but a mighty glove. Humiliated and
distraught; martyrdom and blood are not worth the brief hour of his
time; light, not blood among wounds and pain and
the lost eyes of human suffering; see the plurality
of the world; light not fire is the keeper of the heart of nature.

João Miguel Fernandes Jorge (born 1943) Portugal
Translated by Carlos Veloso
Source: A repertoire of contemporary Portuguese poetry edited by Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2008
  • The sculpture in question is in Angra do Heroísmo, Azores

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