Tag Archives: Ekphrastic Poetry

Fresh Sheets

15 Replies

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.

Mulberry

15 Replies

After reading Dwight Roth’s ekphrastic poem on Vincent Van Gogh, I had to consider it as a challenge. I wrote this poem over 25 years ago. Couldn’t resist publishing it as an answer to his.


Mulberry

Vincent, who scratched your sky
And put tormented souls into your tree?
Who pushed white waterfalls
From gray granite
and ran white water purple down to these words,
etched into a marker by the stream.

Vincent, who scratched your sky
And fired the dying branches of your tree?
Who carved white steps
From living hillside?
What figure yellow-robed ascends
To cast a scribbled shadow down to green?

Vincent, who scratched your sky
and set the worm to work your tortured tree?
Who hid the bad boy
In the brush,
Then set his white soul down
To weather on the gravestone of a frozen dream?

 

For dVerse Poets

On Picasso’s Imaginary Self-Portrait

7 Replies

Picasso

 

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.

 

Reblog For dVerse Poets: Clown

Restoring the Garden

12 Replies
Screen Shot 2020-04-06 at 1.53.28 AM

Restoring the Garden

Mankind’s not in a bubble, we are linked to Nature’s plan.
There are no separate provinces for animals and man.
All the riches of the world aren’t here for just our pleasure.
What we do to nature, it returns in equal measure.
This folly has gone far enough. The fools must be curbed.
The balances of nature have been cruelly disturbed.

Take back control from those who unwisely wield their power,
or nature will find other ways to make us cringe and cower.
She has put us in a prison in judgement for our sin,
providing us with jailers who control us from within
while those we have mishandled roam freely all around—
Fly and swim and crawl and run, scamper, leap and bound.

Only we are prisoners and will be ’til we’ve learned
not to take more than our share or more than we have earned.
This absurd behavior of the naughty little boys
who have seized our planet’s riches as their private cache of toys
will bring us all to ruin if we don’t curb their powers,
for they cannot see the truth of things up in their lofty towers.

 

For NaPoWriMo 2020, Day 6: Write a poem inspired by characters in Hieronymous Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights. “