My Madonna

A man walks into a brothel with money in his pocket and hunger in his heart. But what he seeks is not the body's bargain, but the soul's salvation. In this devastatingly brief poem, Robert W. Service transforms a transaction into a Transfiguration: the poet asks a prostitute to hold a child and pose as the Madonna, and in that act of seeing, he reveals something unbearable about love, sacrifice, and the mothers we all carry within us. The power lies not in what happens, but in what the speaker sees when he looks past sin to the sacred. Service, the bard of the Yukon who gave us "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," proves here that his true territory was never gold or guns, but the gold-dust of human tenderness. A poem that will rearrange your understanding of what it means to look at another person and see something holy.