Writing Prompt 11

Welcome to the eleventh day of our 30/30!

Your prompt today is:

Describe a statue of justice.
Alternatively, describe a statue of love, hope, despair, time,
or another favorite abstraction.

Image credit www.cliparts.co
Guidelines, if you want them:

Posting your response is not required
Feel free to post your response 🙂
This is not meant to be the perfect first draft – respond without hesitation for 5-7 minutes, then keep going if you want to
While our prompts are geared towards poetry, we welcome all kinds of artists
Tips & encouragement are here

3 comments

The Empty Pedestal
(AP Photo Week of 4 April)

I cannot name the place except to
say it is a city of war, the rockets and
bombs, the deafening noise of death.

She is the Madonna in a sea of women
her son has been slaughtered by the
latest wave of artillery. She is Feruzzi’s

Madonna of the Streets, fast forward
from 1897. What did he see that day
that prompted his painting of love and

desperation, using the eleven-year old
girl and her baby brother to capture the
fierceness of a mother’s protective love,

the trust of the sleeping infant. Here in
this sea of faces etched with the deep
lines of fear, this mother, but with eyes

downcast, yields to the cruelty of what
they have told her: he is gone. She is both
Madonna of the Streets and the Pieta

for the modern world but where is a
Michelangelo now? Who will place her
grief in a cathedral, lest we forget this

agony that touches every mother, war
in the name of land and power. How many
other Madonna’s stretch across the globe

whose hands clutch at fate, grip in pain,
grab at cloth and skin, rending until our
hearts, surely, bleed just a drop or two.

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Two feet firm on the ground,
eyes straight ahead, soft and lightly focused,
skin feeling the nuances of air,
ears hearing even the breath of sound,
nostrils neither wide nor narrowed
with the scent of pure objectivity,
all features those of no one yet all humanity,
ungendered, unraced,
cast not in concrete nor carved in alabaster
but roughed out in jasper or worked in common wood,
justice stands.

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