Poetry Workshop--Ekphrastic Poem
An ekphrastic poem (for those who don't know--and I didn't, until a week ago, okay smarty pants?) is one that is based on a work of art. Like Keats' ode to that Grecian Urn (just sayin' honey, but I've seen prettier vases at the MFA. Check it out sometime. :P). Or Don McLean's "Starry Starry Night" song, which Josh Groban does a marvelous cover of.
I digress. :)
I ended up picking Van Gogh's Houses at Auvers because I love Van Gogh and I have a copy of this painting in my room, and I bought a little stained glass version for my mom to hang in one of the kitcken windows. And it sort of reminds me of Santa Maria. <3 This sort of turned into an exercise in "Girl is crushing on dead historical figures, AGAIN, and is walking the fine line between crazy and sane." I'm not overly satisfied with how this came out, but I've never written anything like this before either. I don't have to hand it in until Thursday evening, so if it's a train wreck, please let me know!!!!
Here's the painting:
And here's the poem:
Van Gogh’s Houses at Auvers
Everyone says you were mad, you know.
But I think we both know better.
You just saw things differently than the rest of us.
The world you saw was vivid and fresh,
With each hue and shadow swirling into the next,
Boundaries and lines surrendering to the onslaught of the brush.
Did you know the woman wading in the stream?
Did you stay in a room under that red roof?
I ignore the people and noise milling about me,
Trying to distract me from our conversation.
I’m not done with you yet.
I wonder if you had anyone sit with you this time,
Another attendant to keep an eye on the madman
Whose paintings his own brother can’t even sell.
They don’t get it.
Not yet.
But they will.
Eventually there will be a kid who pays just to come visit you,
To look at but never touch the whirling pigments in the frame.
Someone who can still see the marks the brush made,
And where you switched things up and smeared the paint with your fingertip.
Who knows that you liked Charles Dickens,
And heeded the lessons that the spirits taught,
Even on that Christmas Eve you’d rather not mention.
Who knows you only ever loved people just a little too much,
That you felt like you needed them more than they ever needed you.
Who knows why you liked that place at Auvers,
Because of the sun baking the old straw hat you favored-
The one keeping the glare at arm’s length-
The smell of hay drying in the fields,
And the mud following suit on the riverbank,
And the cloying mix of ancient and new and life
That the water is giving off.
The sound of the breeze moving through
The tall grass, the trees, the secret places
Between the four houses that aren’t fooling anyone,
Like they didn’t just decide to lean on one another like that,
Tired of the wind and rain and sun and sometimes snow
Always poking and prodding at the whitewash.
You recognize these things and that it’s up to you to fix them to something
Before the woman rounds the bend in
The stream and you miss this…
All this…
This.
I snap out of it when my friend tugs on my hand.
She wants to see the Japanese prints-
You’d like them, they’re Meiji-
And besides, the field trippers behind us are getting restless.
So I go, letting the world back in and releasing you back to them,
But not without a furtive peek past my shoulder,
Because I know you weren’t mad, you know.