A note about the work "The Death" from Mary Jo Bang: “The Death” is from The Museum of Mary, a book-length series of ekphrastic poems where each poem has a debt to a woman named Mary. My approach here, as with all the poems in the series, was to find an artwork that featured a Mary and use that as a stage setting from which a speaker could address any number of concerns. In this poem, the Virgin Mary, as the ever-watchful guardian religion says she is, speaks about the present-day world. It is believed that the original composition of the painting linked to this poem, Mantegna’s Death of the Virgin, included a second painting that was meant to hang above the first; they share the lines of a continuous architectural arch. It is in that second painting, Christ Bearing the Soul of the Virgin, that Christ holds a doll-sized statuette of the Virgin on his lap. The two are wreathed in a cloud punctuated by the heads and wings of red cherubs. The lower painting features Mary at her death, surrounded by eleven of the twelve apostles (one is away preaching). As with all persona poems, the hope is that the speaker, here a divine Mary, will have more authority than a mere poet when it comes to bringing attention to our human plight.