—Head of a Female Statue, 2nd Century AD.
She carries the look I know well—solemn shock of a woman
who’s seen it all. Below her frozen eyes, two rivulets of mascara.
A museum guide explains that they’re residue from her bronze
eyelashes decaying over centuries. Listen to the ways men deny
the obvious. He doesn’t see her smashed nose, her broken lip?
Even the stones weep to know what it’s like to be shaped by hands,
worshipped by hands & defiled by the same hands you blessed.
Even the stones grieve at the full range of the human experience—
the terror/the awe; the beauty/the ghastly; the resurrection/the desecration;
the stagnation/the transformation; the creation/the destruction.
It’s all captured in her eyes, in the streams of metallic pain inked beneath them.
Her silent brokenness on eternal display, the last gift she bequeaths men.