Tag Archives: poem about art

Art and Industry

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Art and Industry

The languid win no prizes, the slothful not one plaudit.
The lazy artist paints no masterpiece for us to laud it.

The book that is not written finds no reader to adore it.
The man who scores no symphony, no audience to “Encore!” it.

“Popular” wins friends but draws no masses to applaud.
The rarest genius unexpressed will fail to leave us awed.

What movie that was never made has won box office fame?
Lighting a little fire won’t do. You have to fan the flame.

Enthusiasm on its own is rarely oohed and aahed.
It takes a little elbow grease to leave us open-jawed.

 

 

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Prompt words today are enthusiasm, masterpiece, popular, languid and win.

Objectification

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Objectification

Objects are dependable. Objects are the best.
Objects do not leave you. They remain there at rest.
They soothe the eye with beauty or operate as slaves,
for objects have served us since humans lived in caves.
Since the first stone hammer or flint carved to a point,
objects have helped to feed us or to pretty up the joint.
Carved into a cave wall, a bison or a bird.
Art lasts for millennia. That’s why I find absurd
those who say things don’t matter, for what I have to say
is that it’s art that lingers. People just pass away.

 

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Fandango‘s prompt today was object. Before you start exclaiming in protest, I’ll issue the disclaimer that this is written a bit tongue-in-cheek. Albeit, I love art. Wouldn’t want to live without it.  But I do realize people are more important.

Fandango‘s prompt was object.

Preposterous Vision

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“Peyote Dream” Painting by Jesus Lopez Vega

Preposterous Vision

My friend Chuy says
it is peyote leached into the soil
the corn grows from
that gives Mexicans
such a remarkable sense of color.
The bright pigments of imagination
flood his canvasses.
His peyote dreams leak out into the real world
and wed it to create one world.
“Peyote dream” becomes its opposite—
a freight train taking us into the universal truth.
A larger reality.
This stalk of corn, this deer,
this head of amaranth,
all beckon, “Climb aboard.”

So when you bite into a taco
or tamale, when the round taste of corn
meets your tongue, and pleasure flows
in a lumpy river down your throat,
look up at what is standing in the shadows
and see that it is light that creates shadow.
See the many colors that create the black.
Follow where the corn beckons you to go—
into the other world of poetry and paint
and dance and music. Hot jazz with a mariachi beat.

Chew that train that takes you deeper. Hop aboard
the tamale express and you will ride into your
new life. It will be like your old life magnified
and lit by multicolored lights and the songs of merry-go-rounds
and when you bite into your taco, it will taste
like cotton candy and a snow cone
and your whole life afterwards will be a train that takes you nowhere
except back into yourself—a Ferris wheel
spinning you up to your heights and down again, with every turn,
the gears creaking “Que le vaya bien.”
I hope it goes well with you
and that you see the light
within the shadow
and the colors
in the corn.

For Fandango’s prompt: preposterous

You Have Become the Art You Lived For

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You Have Become the Art You Lived For

The caustic smell of metal in your sweat
that by the end could fill the room,
as though the bronzes you had formed
had now invaded you
and filled you, blood and fiber.
Art can’t hurt you,
declared your favorite T-shirt,
colorful and now the final irony
of your life.

My dear,
art brought about your ending
as surely as it made your life,
yet you would have loved the bittersweet joke
as your kids and I
dressed you in that T-Shirt
for your final viewing.

You surround me even now—
brought two thousand miles
from Northern California
to middle Mexico.
The life you hoped to live, I live with those
who know you only through
your spiral lamp of stone and liana and paper,
Chi Wara standing feathered, bronze and tall,
the nude I posed for, on her side
with sticks for head and feet and cassowary feathers
hanging down from them,
the spirit sled of beaten copper, rawhide and willow—
all of them as exotic as you
never felt yourself to be.

They were beautiful and rare
and loved as you were.
How maddening
that you could not be
convinced of it.

That is why, when I think of you
now, so many years after,
the air grows pungent
with your memory.

(click on first photo to enlarge all)

For some reason, this is the only photo I have of the spiral lamp. I’ll replace it with a better one later.

 

 

To see more of Bob’s art and read another poem about him, go HERE.

 

The prompt today is “pungent.”

Empty Studio

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  daily life color132

Empty Studio

My memories
are footsteps
leading me to you.

I smell your scent of wood,
your sweat with the bouquet of bronze,
remember the finger you sacrificed
to impetuosity and art.

Finally the world fed all of you to the blade––
our severance as final as one of your straight sure cuts––
making you into memory I follow one step at a time,
my passing visible through stone dust
and wood shavings on the floor.

This is how you and I
create patterns
even after you are gone
from memories as fragmented
as what you left behind
when you created art––

stone chips, sawdust, pebbled glass,
curls of metal and winged shards of paper––
my footprints
pushing them farther apart
each time I pass through.
Leaving more of me
and less of you.

daily life color133

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/footsteps/