By Valerie Rivera
For the longest time,
I never understood
The worshippers of art museums.
To me, paintings and sculptures
Were simply “ooo’s” and “ahhs,”
Nourishment to the eye
But not to the soul.
I’d look deep into their
Magnificent shades, tones and hues,
At each calculated chip of chisel
And perfect polish of paint,
Imbued with so many once secret emotions,
And I’d still struggle to find that holiness
That comes so easily to museumgoers.
But a strange thing happened
At a museum with my aunt.
So many of the portraits,
Even if only for a fleeting moment,
Seemed to wear same expression
As people I’ve seen before–
The portrait of the Native American chief
Who slightly resembled Cillian Murphy,
The dreamy girl with a flower crown
With a countenance like Billie Eilish,
The sober woman in a black velvet dress
Who almost looked like my aunt herself.
It’s funny, how some faces
Never die.
Then, I could almost see myself
In these paintings;
The women with pale and supple naked bodies,
Flaunting, not hiding,
Natural tummies and rolls
Not so far off from the one
That greets me in the mirror when I emerge from a shower.
Though I’ve never felt even a drop of her lament,
The mourning Egyptian mother’s
Dark mass of curls
Fell over her shoulders
Almost like mine.
And the two women at the window
Mimicked my best friend and I–
Our teasing and shared laughter at each other.
And suddenly, I’m reminded how
We’ve all differently shared the same lives.
At some point, there lived a woman
Who looked exactly like me, but was
Called by a different name,
Spoke in a different tongue,
Was loved by different people
Now tucked beneath the Earth
While she, if she is lucky,
Sits immortal in a
A gilded frame.
I may never have felt
That Egyptian mother’s grief,
But I wonder how many have knelt
On the floor
In her exact position,
Weeping for their own heartbreak,
But weeping together,
Separately,
Across time.
What is art,
If not a mirror through time
In which we see not only ourselves
But all who came before,
And all who stopped and stared
In front of a portrait
Because they so well knew the
300 year old joy and grief and fear and
Love
From a single painted face?
That, to me, is holy.
Contributor Bio
Valerie Rivera is a first year English major with a creative writing concentration and a minor in psychology. She has always loved to read and write, especially poetry, and has dreamed of being a writer since she was a kid. She also loves art, and is an avid doodler.