With her left hand she says, “See

this masterpiece they’ve given me

then taken it away again.

They even call him Son of Man

as if I had no claim on Him.

He slips between my knees. He is

more now than I can bear.”

Pity the woman who’ll demand

that she have equal rights to one

who calls himself her son.

In the Deposition

the sculptor will assume

the role of Nicodemus

carrying himself the burden,

Mary and Magdalene merely

a supporting chorus.

Next, the women are left alone

to support Christ, a heavy man

in middle age, the torso one

the sculptor knows

as if it were his own.

The weight of it

with which these women struggle

is far too much for them.

But when he carves the last

reducing it until

it becomes light enough

for her alone to hold,

she is once more the sole support,

not of a horizontal weight,

a rising one, columnar, one

with her. She struggles to support

the God, the man, the son she bore

until the arm that guides the stroke

that breaks away the stone, is severed

from the sculptor’s heart,

so that the work itself

is left unfinished. She remains

trying to lift the dead.

—Claire Nicolas White