Poem of the Day: ‘and ran away naked’

The poem homes in on one small, strange moment in the melee of a betrayal in a garden, in the dark small hours of a Friday morning—and ends with the devastating words, ‘As prudence bids one do.’

The New York Sun

For Good Friday, the New York Sun continues its Holy Week series of poems read by living poets. A poet in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Maryann Corbett is the author of In Code and five other poetry collections. For Holy Week, she reads her sonnet, “. . . and ran away naked . . .” A medieval scholar and translator, recipient of both the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, Corbett here has tweaked the structure of the Petrarchan sonnet, employing a rhyme scheme of abbacddcefgefg. The poem homes in on one small, strange moment in the melee of a betrayal in a garden, in the dark small hours of a Friday morning—and ends with the devastating words, “As prudence bids one do.”

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