How that florid scent
Wafts through your two vents
Making all your senses yield
To wilderness in a field.
How the petals soft
Carry you aloft
To the clouds above us all,
Lightly float and never fall.
How the colors beam
In a matching scheme,
Fine art in a museum
Painting over tedium.
Yet how flowers fail!
Before you they’re pale,
My Lady across the earth,
Rarest blossom the world hath.
-Evan Mantyk
Martin, what a generous and inspirational comment. My Muse is dancing with delight and telling me to fetch my pen…
... and I absolutely love your “memento mori” observation. My personified Earth IS whispering of our own mortality. Perhaps the…
Brian, as ever your comments are perceptive and generous and a pleasure to receive. Your close reading of the form…
a beautiful poem! as delicate as a snowflake!
Margaret, you are spot on with your observations and I thank you for your kind and encouraging comment.
PEONIES, SHELL, AND COILED CANDLE: AFTER STONE ROBERTS
Upon the pale and shiny stonework ledge
sits shell, white vase, and beeswax candle coil.
Here is a neoclassical-clear edge,
a spare, fine atmosphere betrayed in oil.
Peony petals drooping, perky too,
in yellow, white, red violet, and pink,
against the wall, a dark gray, background hue;
one wonders how they smell, sweet, light, or stink.
The smoothness is disturbed by sharp-shaped conch,
the long-line grooves and patterns of the vase,
the copper-finished plate and clip ensconced
about the sixty-hour candle’s base.
A New Dutch Realist has been let loose
where once New Amsterdam was in the News.