April 8th poems
Eight rhymes with great, which is what you are if you’ve been keeping up with the PAD challenge so far. Today is a Tuesday–sooooooo, that means you will get to choose from two prompts this morning. Actually, you’ll get to choose from two paintings, because today’s prompt asks you to write a poem that is inspired by one of the two paintings linked below. Please indicate the title of the painting or the artist’s name somewhere in your comment as well. Of course, there is also the possibility that you could blend the two together. Hmmm…
Anyway, here are the paintings:
Painting #1: Piazza d’Italia, by Giorgio de Chirico
Painting #2: The Little Deer, by Frida Kahlo
Ah, Frida
Ah, Frida,
How well I know that feeling!
Bad hair day?
No time to wax your brows?
Nor even clean behind your ears?
Small wonder it seemed nobler
in your mind to run and hide and
suffer the slings and arrows
of your own outrageous fortune,
than to take comb and scissor
against your sea of split ends
and by opposing end them.
–Candace
Piazza d’Italia in Perspective
Why do they linger in the center of town
at sunset
when decent folks sit down to supper?
Perhaps they are lonely bachelors,
no one to feed them,
love them.
May I offer a suggestion?
Life will never change here.
Catch a ride on the train,
before it’s too late.
–Amy
(paintings)
GIORGIO
Master of aloneness,
Creator of stillness and
The absence of sound.
Portrayer of long shadows
And the silent train
Across a plaza empty of life -
Only a renaissance sculpture
And two figures
In dumb greeting.
FRIDA
Portrayer of unending pain
April 13th, 2008 at 6:45 pmShe of the interlocking eyebrows
and ruptured heart
Self-induced tragedy
in oil paint.
Seeking to be the defenseless victim
Of an uncaring world.
Too bad.
But she married Rivera of her own free will,
Didn’t she?