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GEOFF PAGE
Quattrocento
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- It’s like a quattrocento painting,
- the episode unknown,
- some fragment from a vanished gospel.
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- A white-robed man is borne towards us
- shoulder-high by seven more
- dressed in what they wore that morning
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- expecting nothing worse than hunger.
- The painter’s frame is dense with
gesture,
- one arm curved against the sky,
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- another raised in shock or protest.
- Their faces are the timeless ones
- old masters always use,
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- each one with its silent shout –
- though one, we see, has tied
- a sweatshirt round his nose and mouth
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- to clarify his breathing.
- The colours are composed and careful
–
- blue shirt to the bottom right,
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- the sweatshirt’s high and sudden
yellow,
- that whiteness in the sky.
- Top right there’s an edge of stone
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- ragged like some Roman ruin.
- The man in white’s a deposition,
- slanted from an unseen cross,
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- except he’s bald – and still
alive.
- The face is calm, and half-forgiving.
- His feet are pale and bare.
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- The white he wears suggests the sacred
- as does the crimson down his chest,
- a vestment with some extra meaning,
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- until we see, at second glance,
- the richness in that redness is
- the sunlight in his blood.
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