Chiaroscuro (Gazing at Caravaggio’s ‘St. Jerome Writing’)

Trinity Chester

Strange, how pen and paper
Give form to flesh and blood—
Who dares to speak, to write
That uncreated, newborn Word?

In principio erat Verbum.
Jerome, Jerome, did you
See how the light cut like
A sword across the page?

You, with a skull beside you
On the table. Strange, how
Light and shadow can make
Even death’s face lovely.

Et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.

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Trinity Chester lives in Denver, a stone’s throw from the mountains, where she works in the nonprofit sector by day and moonlights as a poet and philosopher. A graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, where she read Great Books and fulfilled her childhood dream of being a librarian, she has long found herself captivated by the written word in all its forms. Her writing has been published in Trivium as well as Philanthropy Daily.