For week four of Poems Of The Week we bring you John Mackinnon and his poem, Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini. Whilst the galleries and museums are closed to the public, perhaps this poem will conjure the imagery of the Italian Masters…
Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini
Madonna
If we are to be judged
it won’t be the bambino
sucking his finger and staring
vaguely heavenwards,
but the unlettered girl watching us,
not smiling, not unkind,
whose charged stance is the question
we won’t evade.
Circumcision
She urgently holds
her child to the knife.
His body shudders
as he takes on the law.
The old priest,
so careful in the act,
is all beard,
eyelid, eyebrow.
Jerome
He is reading a book
in a rock landscape
a face disfigures.
It frames the lit city
and the hills’ recession.
While the lion waits
he will lift God’s word
on the state’s stretched tongue.
Mackinnon states, …”recently I have been writing a series of short poems on paintings; the poems here relate to the National Gallery’s 2019 exhibition of Bellini and Mantegna and their permanent collection. I see a poem as an exploration of a territory opened up by some kind of form or material.” Mackinnon website is www.johnmackinnon.org.uk.