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Replicas

Watching a class sketch
Roman sculptures at the museum
has gotten me thinking.

They were earnestly trying
to reproduce the elegant forms
of these cast concrete counterfeits

of real Roman works,
which, in turn, were
agapanthus clad copies

of magnificent Greek marble figures,
so representative of beautiful mankind
in supple dignity and heroic stature

idealized, but immobile versions, resembling
actual, breathing, flesh and blood humanity,
who at most are just sacramental symbols

of their own eternally unfeigned souls
–never born and never dying–
in all their sensibility and prowess,

which themselves are simply mirror images
of the one and only infinite Creator,
of whom there is no other.

by Polly Castor
2/6/17

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