NaPM 18 April 2022

[RiverNotch]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Topic: This is one of my favourite prompts, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves it, though I've made it a little more specific. Write an ekphrastic poem based on a piece of visual art that you didn't make yourself; include the art, or a link to a copy of the art, in your post.

Form: Any

Line Requirement: At least 8

[Magpie]

M.C. Escher - Ascending and Descending

[Semicircle]

That "Peter Paul" thing was clever, I have to say,
even though it was technically a pun; although,
I'm not sure if a pun is appropriate for the subject matter
even though it would be a shame to get rid of it.
If this was a more lighthearted poem it would work
but it seems a bit jarring for me.

---

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2a8f27863...quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1db3fd6646a1db6b2972efa5bce068ff

Francis Bacon- The Black Tryptichs





He's dead there
and I left him
hunched over
the toilet.

I am the abuser;
I thought I was
incapable,
but he's dead:
I killed him.

I am a masochist
but I realize now,
to become corrupted,
you must be a sadist as well.

Though, I did not revel in his pain,
I did to my own,
when he died.

[CRNDLSM]

Somehow the world disappears
on a wet road, windshields clear,
waves of the wharf rise and fall,
Wheels roll on and miss your call.
Maybe I'm ungrateful dear
This song could repeat all year
Rats wash up against the wall
I'm not ready to end it all.

[Video: https://youtu.be/20dic8S3cWI]
[Video: https://youtu.be/P6NDmh86RAI]

[dukealien]

https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2012/09/01...7_1280.jpg

Mountain Heart


Cold as stone he stands
rooted from his waist up
in a mountain that was not
even known when he became
its first and, really, only
president.

Somewhere just below
where jackhammer carving ends
his heart of stone still beats
slow, once in four years
pulse of a continent.

Over his shoulder Jefferson
libertine so mad he wore
his own hair (the idea!)
and made sport with women
he married or he owned
whispers grand ideals
that made Washington
mere President and not
King as God meant him to be.

Far from both Lincoln smiles
less sadly than does Washington
for he made an omelette of
paired eggs the two had broken
and died of an Easter
often raised but never risen.

And poor Teddy of the Bear
glasses without glass
blind in one eye
making empire without emperor
like Washington’s kingdom
without king
shadowed, shaded, incomplete.

But the mountain heart persisted
beating for two centuries until
in one diseased and fraudulent
quadrennial it broke.

[Magpie]

That "Peter Paul" thing was clever, I have to say,
even though it was technically a pun; although,
I'm not sure if a pun is appropriate for the subject matter
even though it would be a shame to get rid of it.
If this was a more lighthearted poem it would work
but it seems a bit jarring for me.

Yeah I know what you mean, 
but i just love a good anagram.
They make me happy.

[RiverNotch]

In a world without tears, what would happen
to bruises, breaks, and bleeds? she asks,
drenched in red, while showing
how the only way to bring about this world
is for everyone to wear a wide-sleeved shirt
and hide their face behind their arms. Her boots
are on the carpet; her guitar, on a stand
behind the sagging couch. You want to ask
for her to show just a little more skin
but then she drops her hands.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e..._Tears.jpg

[Mark A Becker]

Try as we might
to break out
into the light,
sooner or later,
we all must come to grips
with the irrefutable
gravity
of being human.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e...ohnson.jpg

[Magpie]

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2a8f27863...quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1db3fd6646a1db6b2972efa5bce068ff

Francis Bacon- The Black Tryptichs

He's dead there
and I left him
hunched over
the toilet.

I am the abuser;
I thought I was
incapable,
but he's dead:
I killed him.

I am a masochist
but I realize now,
to become corrupted,
you must be a sadist as well.

Though, I did not revel in his pain,
I did to my own,
when he died.

So it was you who killed Elvis on the toilet and not a heart attack

[Semicircle]

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2a8f27863...quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1db3fd6646a1db6b2972efa5bce068ff

Francis Bacon- The Black Tryptichs

He's dead there
and I left him
hunched over
the toilet.

I am the abuser;
I thought I was
incapable,
but he's dead:
I killed him.

I am a masochist
but I realize now,
to become corrupted,
you must be a sadist as well.

Though, I did not revel in his pain,
I did to my own,
when he died.

So it was you who killed Elvis on the toilet and not a heart attack

He kept shooting my TVs. Bad roomate.

[TranquillityBase]

FoForr reasons unknown, Gardner aimed
his camera only at the bodies of the enemy,
Confederate artillery men piled
like bags of grain about a caisson
in front of a pockmarked whitewashed church,
scattered Louisianans along a fence row,
North Carolinians heaped together in a sunken road
or an anonymous young soldier "found on a hillside"
alone in the disordered pose of a final moment,
all awaiting shallow mass graves.

Gibson developed the plates
inside a stifling tent, his hands black
with silver nitrate, battling the flies
drawn to the collodion, amid the stench
of hundreds of corpses, human and animal.

Two weeks after the slaughter
The Dead of Antietam opened 
in Matthew Brady’s gallery on Broadway.
Crowds of people go up the stairs,
bend over stereographic viewers:
“Hushed reverent groups standing
around these weird copies of carnage
chained by the strange spell
that dwells in dead men’s eyes.”

Stereo views: 50 cents.  Cartes de visite: 25 cents.

It was the first and last exhibit of the killed.
Bloodier battles were to come,
but there was no Dead of Chancellorsville, 
of Gettysburg, of Chickamauga.
The appetite for the photographic reality of war
was sated by the Confederate dead left behind
along Hagerstown Pike in 1862.


https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/blog/the...f-antietam