Poem of the Day: ‘and ran away naked’

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.”