NP: More about annunciation

[Krafft, John M.]

Maybe some of you will enjoy comparing/contrasting the annunciations in these poems more than my students do.



                            Kay Smith
                          Annunciation
                            for Kathy

In all the old paintings
The Virgin is reading--
No one knows what,
When she is disturbed
By an angel with a higher mission,
Beyond books.

She looks up reluctantly,
Still marking the place with her finger.
The angel is impressive,
With red shoes and just
A hint of wing and shine everywhere.
Listening to the measured message
The Virgin bows her head,
Her eyes aslant
Between the angel and the book.

At the Uffizi
We stood
Before a particularly beautiful angel
And a hesitant Sienese Virgin,
We two sometimes women.
Believing we could ignore
All messages,
Unobliged to wings or words,
We laughed in the vibrant space
Between the two,
Somewhere in the angled focus
Of the Virgin's eye.

Now, in the harder times,
I do not laugh so often;
Still the cheap postcard in my room
Glints with the angel's robe.
I look with envy
At the angel and the book,
Wishing I had chosen
One or the other,
Anything but the space between.
                                                           --1986



                           W. B. Yeats
                        Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
                                                           --1923


jmk