Two "Emmaus" Poems: Denise Levertov and Natasha Trethewey

The Servant-Girl at Emmaus
(A Painting by Velázquez)

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his — the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face — ?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching
the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

+ Denise Levertov

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or The Mulata
— after the painting by Diego Velàzquez, ca. 1619

She is the vessels on the table before her:
the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher
clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red
and upside down. Bent over, she is the mortar
and the pestle at rest in the mortar — still angled
in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls
and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung
by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled
in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.
She's the stain on the wall the size of her shadow —
the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo
of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:
his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans
into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

+ Natasha Trethewey

Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated to the United States as a young adult. By the time of her death in 1997, she had published nearly fifty volumes of poems, prose, and translations. She taught at several universities, including Stanford, where she converted to Christianity at the age of 60 — and a few years later, gathered together many of her poems on religious themes into one remarkable volume, The Stream & the Sapphire (highly recommended!). Of that collection, Levertov wrote that her aim was to “trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much doubt and questioning as well as affirmation.”

Natasha Trethewey was born in Mississippi. Her first collection of poems, Domestic Work, published in 2000, was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. In 2007, Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her third collection, Native Guard. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012-14, and has now published five volumes of poetry, a memoir, and a meditation on Hurricane Katrina, among other works.

The painting, “Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus,” is widely considered Diego Velázquez’s earliest known work. After beginning his career in his native Seville, Velázquez moved to Madrid and became the leading artist at the court of King Philip IV. By depicting Christ appearing to his disciples at Emmaus in the background, and an African servant in the foreground, Velázquez inverted the usual arrangement — a move inspired by Flemish painters, such as Pieter Aertsen, in effect elevating ordinary people and tasks. The painting is in the National Gallery of Ireland; a later version (without the Emmaus scene in the background) is in the Art Institute of Chicago. The two can be viewed as an imaginative theological pair: the first just before Jesus is recognized, and the second just after, when he “vanished from their sight” (Luke 24:31).