Guest Edited Poetry

Enrico Scrovegni Commissions Giotto

Shenandoah Literary Magazine · Jacqueline Oshwrow--Enrico Scrovegni Commissions Giotto

First and last: overwhelm with blue.
Here’s my purse for the lapis lazuli.
Paint it. Blind me with it. Make it true.

I sought out genius—the world named you—
to paint away my father’s sin of usury,
cleanse me in your pure, enduring blue.

Start with Joachim; he stumbled too,
repented, then had a daughter: Mary.
(I too repent. Paint it. Make it true.)

Paint how he kissed his wife. Paint what he knew:
tenderness, absolution, ecstasy
and after: Mary’s life. Seal it with blue.

Then paint her son’s life. Paint vice. Paint virtue.
Birth. Marriage. Death. The human story.
Envy. Wrath. Despair. Paint what’s true

or at least what might be. Help me undo
a life of error, self-absorption, folly
with a never-ending baptism of blue.
Make me truthful, Giotto. Make me new.

Jacqueline Osherow has authored nine poetry collections, most recently Divine Ratios (LSU Press, 2023). This is the opening poem of her forthcoming collection, After Giotto (LSU Press, 2027). She’s received Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Witter Bynner Prize. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, A Century of Poems in the New Yorker. She’s a distinguished professor at the University of Utah.

FROM Volume 75, Number 2

Issue 75.2, Spring 2026

Enrico Scrovegni Commissions Giotto

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