Angel in the Stone

Michelangelo, show me how your hands work.

This colossal body sits heavy before me, too

clean and pure for my spoiled hands, for they

have held too much to know how to be gentle.

What is divine and what is me?

There is sin in me, an unholiness, and

nothing godly about the way I work.

Yet, one chip with the cold chisel, a hand emerges

from the bursting of stone, a birth of white light.

And slowly, with force and knowing,

an angel is formed, awoken with bleary eyes

and expectant wings where she lay asleep all along.

A slab of stone is nothing more than what you make from it,

and beauty I will make of myself.

Like an angel in the stone, I am made free.