The Angel with the Broken Wing by Dana Gioia
Film
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It hasn't to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it.
- Robert Frost
Age of Muses is proud to present the first of many films in its Education through Poetry series. As our first production, we offer an adaptation of former California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia’s “The Angel with the Broken Wing.” Filled with deep ironies and spiritual paradoxes, the work is an exemplar of what an ideal poem looks like today. Not only this, it is a demonstration of the power that great poetry has to impart not only truly timeless beauty and wisdom, but to leave us with what the poet Robert Frost famously described as “an immortal wound.”
For, poetry awakens the heart as well as the mind, and bridges them in ways that few mediums can. So, Age of Muses is in the midst of a full-spectrum effort at cultural revival, with a commitment to further building on the best of the Western classical tradition. We speak of that same sacred musical tradition with which the likes of a Homer, the Psalmist David, Dante, Shakespeare and immortal poets across the ages have succeeded in awakening the best in mankind.
Moreover, rather than simply hearkening back to the past or trying to imitate it today, we are committed to demonstrating what such new timeless art and culture looks like right now—within our own unique age.
Lastly, those interested in supporting our Education through Poetry film series and seeing a full-spectrum revival of timeless art and culture can become Age of Muses paid subscribers.
Without further ado, we present “The Angel with the Broken Wing.”
The Angel with the Broken Wing
By Dana Gioia
I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.
The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.
Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.
I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.
I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.
For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.
There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the damned can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.
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