The Annunciation

After Fra Angelico's painting in the Museo de San Marco
The long stone corridor ends at Savonarola's cell
lined with portraits of his dark-boned face, eyes
of fire and cinder, that muscular mouth whose words
drained the bloom from Botticelli's faces, leaving
them yellowing in an airless gloom.
You walk back
past the chaste twilight of each cell, peer at figures
in robes bloodied, or filled with light — each one
a masterpiece for the inward eye …
You walk back
until you reach the starting point, where you see
again the girl who sits unstartled on a bench,
quietly admitting the angel to her thoughts.
He is plainly there, his wings methodical rainbows
of yellow, crimson, blue; between halo and wingtip,
he spans an arch. He has come to announce, to gaze …
Hers is the stranger face. Her skin, free from
Byzantium's gold, wears the warm clear light of Florence.
In garments of primrose, olive, she leans forwards,
listening. The angel waits on her word which she gives,
and it becomes flesh. The light does not change.
Only her folded hands tremble. There is no other sign.
She is the one about whom we have imagined everything,
know nothing. "This joy, that grief, were what
Mary felt when her son was born to her, lost to her,
tortured then put to death' — litanies of tenderness,
apocrypha of pain, we have invented to comfort,
punish ourselves. She has been given, in recompense,
a sinless life, virgin motherhood, a death without corruption
and an assumption into clouds of rose-tinted gold.
She asked for none of these. She asked for nothing:
"Thy will be done'.
The cameras flash, but do not illumine
her eyes, opaque and shining as drops on a blade of grass
reflecting the white and gold of the small flowers,
the scarlet of a passing wing.