A man took a hammer
to Michelangelo’s Pieta,
breaking Mary’s nose
in three, fragmenting
her fingers, leaving shards
at tourists’ feet.
Someone rescued her
eyelid while someone else
stole a tiny chip of her, then
later sent it back. Outside
San Leandro’s
church, St Felicitas stood,
stoic, as eight bullets pierced
her plastered body.
The vandal’s aim marked
numbered fury at sacrifice.
In a Nagasaki cathedral,
bombed Mary’s eyes turned
to crystal, the only survivor.
She watched
everything destroyed
around her. Full restoration
is impossible when
dealing with the flesh, but
we had always hoped our art
would be immortal. In grief,
we feel the wounds become stone.
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s fourth collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in February 2021. Her work has recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of the online literary magazine, Memorious.org.