Gnostic Poem by gershon hepner

Common Era, around Fifty-five,
vivid portrait on encaustic,
looks as though she really is alive,
far too early to be Gnostic.
Gnostics didn’t live where this was found,
Egypt, where they buried her,
mummified, within the arid ground
where flesh remains until you stir
the earth, disturbing pickled entrails and
the shriveled, shrunken, scaly skin
which was protected by the hot, dry sand
until men dug and trespassed in
her grave. Her portrait makes her look so vivid,
bright eyes that stare intensely at
the artist, and two luscious lips that livid
invite another pair. Now that
she’s been exhumed we also wonder what
she died of. Maybe diagnostic
tests will give an answer, maybe not.
I look at her and feel agnostic.

Inspired by an article in the TLS, November 28,2008 by Alexander Murray, discussing an exhibition of Byzantine treasures at the Royal Academy. His favorite exhibit was this:

The face is of a middle-aged woman, wearing discreet earrings and a small necklace. She was surely wife and mother to a self-respecting family. She appears her in “encaustic” (wax fixed by heat) on a limestone panel once on a mummy-tomb in Hellenistic Egypt, made some year between AD 55 and 70. Robin Cusack (co-organizer of the exhibition with Maria Vasilaki of Athens) tells us in the catalogue that we must not take her picture for a likeness. So be it; but she looks more like a real human being than anything else in the exhibition.

12/18/08