La Resurrezione di Piero della Francesca | The New Republic

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Rowan Ricardo Phillips/

December 24, 2025

La Resurrezione di Piero della Francesca

for my father

The dawn behind the hill is neither cold nor kind,

Its greenish air hangs still, an older light restored

From a stone box, the risen body calm and grave,

As though the world beneath were thought of but not yet

Made, the guards falling inwards on themselves like leaves,

Their armor bent to sleep, their weapons to the ground,

The stone itself aroused as if recalling forms,

Each figure finding a place within the painter’s sum:

The trees to the left, winter’s map—bare, bone, undone;

To the right, the season’s flowers, dense, perpetual green;

And between these two, a body nude and sure,

One foot bossing the ledge, one hand palming the flag—

A cross of blood and cloth, a geometry of faith,

The face calm, the eyes fixed, mastering the air,

Looking out upon them and remembering how

The dreamer sees himself within this risen form,

Such perspective governing even God’s ascent,

Sansepolcro’s walls encircling us like a crown,

A city named for burial yet seeking birth

Here in the stone that became the medium of time’s return,

And light, the solvent where we mortals learn to see

What rises here—neither miracle nor myth—

But stillness given flesh and proportion given breath,

The painter’s measured dreaming holding the hour firm,

His compass, out of grace, drawing reason forth,

Thought, beginning again, in every dormant soldier,

In every shade of green, the earth rehearsing faith

In ash pink, gold gray, ochre, living turquoise,

Clamshell, umber, infinite Tuscan silence.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the poetry editor of The New Republic. His most recent book is Silver.