Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Freeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern, and today is

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020. Today's poem is by an American poet named Jill Kress Karn. She's the author of

The Figure of Consciousness, William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Her poems have appeared in

many places like Alaska Quarterly Review and Carolina Quarterly. She teaches

at Villanova University and lives in Philadelphia currently. What I'm going to do today is actually

share a poem that we had the pleasure of publishing in Forma Journal. If you don't know about

former, you can head over to FormaJournal.com to learn more. We publish a number of poems in each

issue. And I liked this poem a lot and wanted to

share it. She's three poems in the newest issue. This one is called Unfinished Madonna. And I hope

you'll forgive me the audacity of suggesting that a poem that was just recently published in a

magazine that I edit is worthy of putting on the podcast.

But I think you'll like this one.

I think it's one that our audience will really appreciate.

Again, it's called Unfinished Madonna.

It goes like this.

In the Galleria del Academia in Florence,

after a row of marble statues, another Pieta.

Nothing like the famous one whose young Madonna, Michelangelo's for certain, shines from marble so lifelike it looks wet with birth.

Here there are only beginnings of faces. A rough block of stone, unpolished, forms the entire back of the figures.

Little detail, though the hands of the dead man draw you in and the legs, joints so delicate,

unbroken, yet almost unhinged.

Her hand imposing, massive, as if she alone could hold this body,

...