Käthe Kollwitz Walks from Florence to Rome, 1907

I walk as a pilgrim

Receive food from villagers

Step through a manuscript

Spirit searcher, holder of stones

In my fortieth year I carry a staff

That will become my husband's spine

I walk through forests

Trees model for frescoes

Paint seeps to walls, becomes

Sure as mineral

Land gives up mystery

Embraces then releases

Like river rejects rock

I pass through a scene of ruins

A marble hand broken at the wrist

Grasps a weapon long fragmented

A carved face peers through dust

Birthing from earth, fossil

To intention, white as bone but not

Delicate foot oddly at rest on its side

A cocoon ambivalent to liveliness

I dig through dirt. My hands cupped

Find arms frozen

In these years ancient relics mimic

What is to come

Battlefields strewn with human designs

Limbs and crowns ignited

From promise

Mothers will scour crust for sons,

For bloody selves

But on this day I am not forewarned

I am coltish, my boy alive,

My grandson a dream

I explore Etruscan tombs

Murals describe afterlife as banquet

Archaic engraved mirror

Depicts a couple's ardent embrace

How can line incised through bronze

Know this?

Furrowed as if making channels for veins

When I was a girl I believed in pagan gods

My preacher grandfather was scandalized

I sat on the floor surrounded by prints

Of Charon, Ares, Aphrodite,

In heroic three-quarter view

How can line love a body?

How can line hold sadness

The way a body stores it?

I emerge from the graves

Their mouths porous like aquatint

A darkness for breathing

And daylight, ecstatic as burnished

Metal set in sun

I come to a simple room to rest

Above my pillow a window

Cut through thick walls

Its pane a composition of paths

The constellations, minuscule dreams

Of energy bursting

The wind, my grief to be formed

Laura Stickney

Notes:

Käthe Kollwitz, (1867-1945) was a great German

printmaker and sculptor. This poem imagines the

walk she took in 1907. She lost her son Peter 

on the battlefield in 1914 in World War I. Her

grandson was killed in WWII.

aquatint-- an etching technique to create a range

of tonalities, dark to light.

photograph of Käthe Kollwitz at her work table,

c. 1910, artnet news