Tag Archives: Ekphrastic Poetry

Still the Universe for dVerse Poets Ekphrastic Prompt, June 19, 2025

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Still The Universe

Bleach all the colors from the flowers. Cancel out the sun.
Stay the music. Still the dance. Tell laughter it is done.
She will not walk this way again so all must cease to walk.
Her conversation’s over. The whole world must not talk.
Earth upon its axis should stop its ceaseless motion.
The cook must quiet his cooking pots, the chemist trash his potion.
The universe must cease to be now that my true love’s dead,
and I’ll lay myself beside her on our wedding bed.

 

For dVerse Poets

To see poems, go to link above. To see the prompt, go HERE.  image from Pixabay.com

Beach Memoirs for dVerse Poets, June 3, 2025

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The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a poem in response to the Picasso painting above.

Beach Memoirs

That good old salty sea air combined with grainy sand
defined my beach vacation and went great with being tanned.
Felt great under my bare feet and squished between each toe.
And left footprints behind me, wherever I chose to go.
It crusted up my toenails and powdered all my floors.
Seeped into my keyboard and creaked up all my doors.
It maintained a constand presence once I got back home.
It sneaked into my ear canals and caked up brush and comb.
In spite of all the nuisance of the sand within my bed,
good memories of beach life still swirl within my head.
Yet I needn’t wax nostalgic, for I find behind each knee,
in pockets, luggage and the floor—the beach came home with me!

Going Spiral

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Georgia O’Keeffe, A Piece of Wood I (1942), oil on canvas, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, gift of The Burnett Foundation

Going Spiral

Few easily attain the goals that are their aspiration
without initial effort that requires perspiration.
Most of us must labor to gain what we desire,
but although we go in circles,  each circle spirals higher.

 

For dVerse Poets we were to write a poem based on a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

Mulberry

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Mulberry

Vincent, what skewed your branches, streaked your sky,
and drew tormented waters from above?
What crops, obscured by grasslands
pressed to earth?
What part of you
at rest beneath that tree––
now only your marker
left for us to see?

For dVerse Poets
To see other responses to this prompt, go HERE.

Wooden Heart (Inspired by Magritte for dVerse Poets)

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René Magritte, Discovery (1927), oil on canvas

Wooden Heart

We often wash our minds clean here on memory lane,
so what was a dark portrait is illumined once again.

Daily random memories wash up on the shore
while sadder associations stand waiting by the door.

I do not choose remembering the dark spots in our past.
It is the brighter moments that I prefer to last.

The heart I formed from copper, the heart you carved of wood.
All the broken contracts healed by all the good.

Love stories come in fits and starts and so it was with ours—
we must choose our final endings by our selective powers

to decide what we will sift from memory’s fine sand,
and though the bitter moments haven’t been fully banned,

I daily choose the moments that I will remember—
that March day when our love was young, not your final September.

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Photos will enlarge if you click on them.

When I met Bob, he was teaching art in Canyon Country, California. One day he brought me this pouch necklace he had made of leather in class. Inside was a wooden heart with his initial on one side and my initial on the other. Yes. I had to marry the man. Later, with his encouragement, I became a metalsmith and formed this heart out of copper for him. The pouch now also contains a lock of his hair, a lock of mine, a miniature bar of chocolate–his favorite food on earth–and a tiny dinosaur carved by one of his small sons in the studio where he worked with his dad. When I admired it, he gave it to me, just as Bob gave to me the family he brought with him when we married.

 

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For dVerse Poets “Everything We See”

Click on above link to see the prompt.  Click on THIS LINK to see other poems written to the prompt.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday Prompt: Clown

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Here is the lithograph I based my poem on:

Pablo Picasso

And here is my poem:

On Picasso’s Imaginary Self-Portrait

Is it conceit or self-knowledge
that makes you paint yourself
in the ruffed collar
of Shakespeare
or a clown?

Satyr, young at heart,
your merry countenance
masks darker moods and behaviors,
the bright pigments
hiding a more somber undercoat.

Picasso,
your children
and your mistresses
might paint you as master:
stern, egotistical,
but always with the backlit inspiration
of genius.
Yet, old goat,
you paint yourself a clown.

For Linda’s SoCS prompt “clown”.

Wallpaper

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Here is my poem in answer to K.F. Hartless’s prompt
to write 50 words or less in response to this image.
Sorry, K.F.  but I cheated and went 11 words over.

 

Homecoming

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Homecoming

All rivers led away from home, each highway, path and plane,
but little did I know that I would be led back again.
Memories pressed upon the page like flowers in a book.
Every story, every poem records a backwards look.

 

The prompt by dVerse Poets is to write a poem based on this amazing painting by  Lee Madgwick. See her other paintings here: leemadgwick.co.uk.
See other poems written to this promt HERE.

Foolish Pride

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Foolish Pride

He folds his arms.
She seals her mind.
Their last contact
back-to-back.
Each sure the other
meant to wound,
pride seals their futures.
Sad ending remembered
for a lifetime.

For The Things Unsaid, 30 words or less
Painting by Ron Hicks

Fresh Sheets

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John Sloan, Sun and Wind on the Roof

The Drying of Sheets in the Wind

When the world seems in a mess and you wax sanctimonious,
railing at the ills of those who make it less harmonious,
remember that life’s curses are only temporary.
When world events eat at your mind and the world feels scary,
remember bed sheets on the line, drying in the sun—
the sound of flapping in the wind as their drying was done.
The smell of bright clean sunlight on each wind-softened fold,
or the cracking of their ice crystals stiffening in the cold.

Remember their warmth around you, fresh from mother’s mangle?
Snapping them out in the air, her bracelets’s harmonious jangle?
Her even movements folding them, then spreading them once more
 for you to slip into your bed as she stood at the door,
storybook in hand for that nightly big procession
through story after story, read in that grand progression
of venturings into a world that seemed so vast and magic,
long before you knew the world to also be so tragic.

Let memories of your mother still be a comfort to you—
with memories of fresh white sheets. And let them both renew you.

 

For dVerse Poets, an Ekphrastic poem.To read more poems written for this prompt, go HERE.