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