Caravaggio's St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness

 

Caravaggio's St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness*

 

Warm cloth against voluptuous young skin 

 

A ghostly gray white draped in fur and scarlet.

 

Curled hair the color of deciduous oak leaves 

 

Surrounds the sculpted beauty distant as desirable. 

 

The pure face looks down.

 

Its only hint of holiness, the fragile wooden cross

 

in his right hand. 

 

 

Sheila E. Murphy

Sheila E. Murphy. In 2020, Luna Bisonte Prods released Golden Milk. Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory (2018).  Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy’s work has appeared widely in journals, including Poetry, Hamilton Stone Review, New York Quarterly, Otoliths, Marsh Hawk Press. 

 

*Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City Museum of Art

image -- wikicommons