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Hieronymus Bosch: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

4/3/2026

Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlands) 1490-1510

Outer Panels.

Triptych Tip-Trick

Eye-tracking glasses show viewers of Bosch triptych are drawn to hell […] The researchers discovered that the pupils of female visitors swelled from 5.2mm when contemplating the Eden panel to 5.4mm when observing the delights panel and 5.8mm when looking at the hell panel. Male pupils, in contrast, were most dilated (8.6mm) when beholding the delights panel, followed by the hell panel (6.8mm) and the Eden panel (6.4mm).
The Guardian 21st June 2023

Boys, come ride a giant rodent,
Flaunt an apple on your head,
Climb inside a pink explodent,
Use a mussel for a bed;

You could hug enormous owls,
Chase a fish to wondrous heights,
Lounge on elephantine fowls:
It’s the Garden of Delights!

Girls, perhaps you would be gladder
In a darker sort of place,
With the chance to climb a ladder
To an eggshell with a face;

Launch a blade between two ears,
Kiss a pig who’s nun as well,
Or be stretched apart like shears
On a harp: and this is Hell.

But there’s something else, verschieden
(Or verschillend, to be Dutch):
An uncrowded sort of Eden –
Nothing strange, or nothing much –

Just one smiley, spiky sprayer
With a bird’s nest (not that odd);
But in this one, dear surveyor,
You will have to deal with God.

Julia Griffin

Julia Griffin has published in several online poetry journals, including Light, Lighten Up Online, Classical Outlook, and The Ekphrastic Review.

**

Upon Peering at The Garden of Earthly Delights

How should one regard you?
Should one study as if poring through
a worn manuscript until a climactic punctus?
Or trifle with musings up to
denouement, up to acceptance,
acquiescence? Circumflex or breve?
Igniferous interrobang?! Mayhap.
Presently, the eye is drawn to the foreground,
shocked at the contrast the ossiferous cluster
evokes. And then the orb expands its gaze.
Berry blue apparatus, thaumaturgic flask
of a fecund alchemy, oracular to natators
among the cosmic chitinous structures,
beings undraped by aeromancy, fallen mortals,
silver mermaids and mermen (look, one
bestrides a fish across the azure sea), the trees
of this perfidious dreamworld shedding fruit
willy-nilly. And close by, riders of all sorts
atop oxen, horses, bears, griffins, and…tarrying
rascal, prithee, tell, do we behold a unicorn otter
strolling among bathing avians of startling mass?

Ah, the impulse to cap that as finality,
the terminal bow to a bacchic shebang.
Natheless, there is a scene to the left, near
the dragon tree, a setting more austere
to the optic than preceding bacchanalia,
a pulse of paradise by a pool of gloom, taken
out of psychic conjurings from bestiaries of olden
wayfarers, and the owl, astute, resting in its rosy
spire, centre of the artwork’s west side, does
the construction double as an aspersorium, could
the night bird be soulfully aware of mortal designs?

And so, the eye fares towards the caliginous gloam,
millions of needles, piercings, visions that many fear
have appeared to them on lucent scrolls of latterly days,
when tidings can be acquired posthaste, humans
as vessels for monstrous imagery, perpetually
afore screens, laden with information endeleas,
have not the ravagings of ugsome malefactions
penetrated people’s minds through media
in this day and age? And art, metaphorical mirror
where nothing is spared, not even lutes or harps
strummed by contorted bodies, the background
of a Tartarean mise en scène of brutality, bastions,
edifices, and dwellings vanquished to wreckage.
A painter gazes blankly from the ruins.

Could feathers of a triptych’s grisaille wingspread,
which depicts a planet spawned through utterance,
assuage stray witnesses, condoning to countenance
the flux unbound by emergence and creation?

Efren Laya Cruzad

Efren Laya Cruzada is a writer who was born in the Philippines and raised in Texas. He studied literature, philosophy, and creative writing at New York University. He was shortlisted for the La Piccioletta Barca Prize, a finalist for a contest at The Ekphrastic Review, and a semifinalist for a Driftwood Press Short Story Contest. The author of Grand Flood: a poem, his poetry has appeared in many venues. He also enjoys traveling, practicing boxing moves, and playing video games in a foreign language. Currently, he is editing his first novel and making steady progress on developing his own little video game.

**

The World in a Hollow Glass Shell

Not at the pinnacle of Purgatory
where the poet Virgil guided
had positioned it,
but serenely floating, round and flat,
within a sheltering
and fragile egg,
an orb that we observe
holding gathering cloud clusters
over a castled, dun-coloured
terrain, mid-hemisphere,
in barely visible atmosphere,
like a transparent gas balloon
we see rise against
a starless backdrop
from a viewpoint
no human eye
was made to see.
The exterior panel wings
hide the triptych's tale
that has progressed
from paradise to sin to
our predestined punishment,
prefigured in a lion's kill,
for all our fallen race.
This odd, disturbing panorama
was lost in our unknowing
and we can not decipher
all these symbols
we misunderstood,
until we see
with Easter eyes
a truer handiwork
that shows a God
who keeps on growing
curiouser and curiouser.

Royal Rhodes

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who studied the Classics and global religions. The enigmatic religious outlook of Bosch has long been an interest of his. The art on the folded wings, enclosing this triptych, especially fascinates him.

**

No Sweet Pleasance

Flanked on either side by visions of Eden and Hell, the center panel of the triptych swarms with human figures, all naked, smooth and oddly asexual, thick as larva on too- ripe fruit, eyed by oversized birds whose sharp beaks could easily pluck them up, though none of the bare and unarmed mannikins seem aware of any threat. Pitiful creatures, here in a world where only God is clothed, where in the Garden of Earthly Delights throngs of solemn people crowd, engaged in a strange environment where luscious fruits, too big to hold and carry away, swallow them instead, where their heads may be embedded in a huge berry, their bodies enclosed in a transparent bubble, or curled up in hollowed out giant drupes, trapped in a closing clam shell, or dancing under an owl. In the middle ground the naked homunculi ride bareback on horses, goats and boars, circling a lake, surmounted by ornate structures, bulbous, pink, elaborately spiked, neither castles nor cathedrals, offering neither shelter nor inspiration.

In all of this fantastic garden, there is nothing that speaks simple comfort, and not one of all these busy figures looks even vaguely amused, much less delighted. Maybe they know there will be no mercy, maybe they are haunted by the promise of hell, waiting for them, dark and pitiless, just past the hinges, in the next panel.

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has always been a writer. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, The Memory Palace, edited by Clare MacQueen and Lorette C. Luzajic, and issues of Verse Virtual, Third Wednesday, Earth’s Daughters, and Caustic Frolic, as well as others. She has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her collection, How to Become Invisible, an exploration of experience with bi-polar disorder, is available from Kelsay Books and on Amazon.

**

opening my kitchen cabinet doors

i turned the knobs on my cabinets
and opened the doors to the
picture inside and it must have been
the cheap wine that hazelled my
aura and i heard angels bloom
and there was no william
blake smile there no perception
nothing opening up much more
than doors no little tie dyed
whites of my eyes filled with
wrath or tears that bend to sloth
the victims of a greasy countertop
no excuses just the ghost of the last
loaf of greed crumbs now and a small
bag of pride sitting next to a new
can of lust sealed in tin or steel
and no dents no rusty edges just 100%
pure it said on the can and
a half full cup of envy lost on the
wicked but spent by those good ones
almost there ready to win the race or in
the race the cans they stared back and the
twinkle from my 88 olympics glasses
free ones i got in a cardboard box filled
with empty cd cases sitting on a lawn
and i recited kipling twice just for
protection just out of protection from
gluttony my third empty glass of cheap
wine and the bulk bag of chocolate
covered almonds whispering
and hissing soothing sweet
sirens calling me from
the second shelf and
a little knowledge
and an empty glass
is a terrible thing
to close
the doors
on

mike sluchinski

mike sluchinski is a recent pushcart prize nominee and adds dadaist, ekphrastic, stream of consciousness, and pop art elements to his punk and post punk collages, poetry, fiction, and non.

**

A World Under a Dome

Indescribable; indecipherable;
an exercise in madness.
Nevertheless, the traveler
walks through this verdant
landscape meeting barely
created humans as they speak
to their maker. He tells them
all these animals are yours;
the vegetation and waters are yours.
Then the traveler sees more humans
arrive bringing with them knowledge
of flesh, lust, pleasure, and domination.
Less space for gardens to flourish;
more behavior to control;
voices in circles drowned out
by demands upon their minds and bodies.
The traveler becomes lost in this bizarre
lexicon of thousands of voices wanting
to be heard. He stumbles, falls, and is swept up
in a current of blackness and smoke.
Awakens on a different
shore, dark, twisted, filled
with screams. Knowledge of death,
decay, and suffering. Music of heaven
no longer fills hearts with comfort.
The traveler is led away into
an empty shell to live out
his final days contemplating
where in the garden he can plant
the seed that will restart paradise.

Laura Peña

Laura Peña is an award winning poet born and raised in Houston, Tx. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Education. She is a primary bilingual teacher as well as a translator of poetry into Spanish. Laura has been a featured poet at Valley International Poetry Festival, Inprint First Fridays, and Public Poetry. She has been published both in print and on-line journals. She has been a workshop presenter at VIPF in the Rio Grande Valley, Tx. and People's Literary Festival in Corpus Christi, Tx.. One of Laura's annual traditions is to write a poem a day for August Postcard Poetry Festival and has participated in the fest for the last 13 years. Laura has performed poetry for Invisible Lines at such venues as Notsuoh, Interchange, Avante Garden, and The Match. Laura translated Margo Stutt Toombs’ poem “How to Tend a Wall” into Spanish and the accompanying short film premiered at Fotogenia Festival 2025 in Mexico City.

**

Garden of Earthly Delights

                                     “I never asked for a soul.”
                                                       —Dean Young

It might be the garden and really seem to matter

that the title’s just the fifth part of the triptych, if
you count the zipped-closed cabinet’s cosmos door

décor. Contrails fizz and drift mascara’d lashes, brush
this screen glass, which means I’ve seen about as much
as I’m going to look. Time of light the sun makes hazard

of anything upright, which rules me down and out.
Even indebted to Delight like this, that blue rutabaga
juice lower left can’t be good, not on your knees
with the squeezer standing, both of you sea monkey

nightmare, shreds of my own pruned thumb panning
through the delirium serum of this image. Today I can’t
even see Q-tips, the family pack, and not think tank
tracks, think Tehran. Scream face boils and howls
from the soap foam down louder and louder.

Upper-right corner of the picture plane, a Hormuz
blue mine floats the Strait of the Seen. Now out here
in our multi-tych, off the State Road shoulder vinyl
picket fencing persists as memory in melted fallen
liquid shadows someone lost of their controlled burn
back, and for a little closer home you taste it.

James D'Agostino

James D'Agostino is the author of Nude with Anything, The Goldfinch Caution Tapes, and Build Your Castle Out of Sugar Cubes All Your Enemies Have Tongues (forthcoming). He teaches at Truman State University, where he just tries to keep up with his students.

**

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Lay and bathe in the clean air,
Tongues untainted and fresh bodies bare,
His place safe haven, well-made.
We walk with Him, never threadbare,
Liquid gold draws a veil–
We failed.

Taste,
Sweet twang,
Our full world of
Revel, Conquer, and play.
This place we’ve made with dripping lips,
Shameless bare hips,
Expect here no true day.
We judge to our desire,
So taste and stay.

Upon dark music we wade, Famine, the green decay. It’s all the same.
Our place betrays. After all we’ve made, we are bare once more— deep in old shame,
Four trampling mares, we see them everywhere.
Labour and war. Our only light, white embers in a reddened night.

Melissa Beasley

Melissa Beasley is a college student who aspires to write fiction and be a lifelong student of literature. In her spare time, she enjoys tea, drawing, and spending time with her people.

**

Theme Park Surprise!

I have a surprise trip for you!   Said the father to his children.  Is it Disney?  No, but it has mountains.  A state park?  No, though there are lakes and animals.  A zoo?  Well, the animals are not in cages — we are going to The Garden of Earthly Delights.  That settled it.  They assumed they were going to some kind of a candy factory near a zoo.

But, surprise indeed, they saw when they arrived at a new Sculpture Garden.  They had been to the one created by Seward Johnson.  The one with sculptures of real paintings.  And the Metropolitan, with its Greek and Roman statues.  But this looked different.

This one was modern.  It was filled with hundreds.  Yes, it had marbles of naked men and woman, sure.  Just like any big museum.  But this one had robotics inserted in each statue, so they could move as if they were alive.  And there were so many!  They looked like real naked people running, sitting, riding horses, or hanging out.  The kids first noticed a parade of the statues on horses, donkeys, elks, goats, and who knows what else, circling around the spa.  The bathers were standing up to enjoy the spectacle.  The kids wanted to join in!   And they could. Right after the ticket booth, each child was handed a remote.   Of course they experimented.

Janis made birds with red splotches grow bigger than the statues and walk into water, even though they were not ducks.  (She hoped they would not drown.)   Matthew decided he wanted something more like Disney, more like a video game.  He experimented with the remote’s buttons, and found he could make things grow into a new shape.  So at the river he made fanciful castles from blue and pink flowers.  He decided they needed weapons (not real ones) to act out a kind of video-game war.  In a pink castle he created little rockets.   He made one castle into a giant ball with spikes.  But he made the other pink and blue castle hide their weapons to ensure surprise once his war started.  To make it all the more complicated, he added a floating lighthouse in the water between the castles.   It took a while to find the buttons and make sure all the robotics worked.  Now the game could begin!

Janis, meanwhile, decided she wanted to get into this game, to mess it up.  She made groups of men push giants of whelk, fish, and mollusk, and other shapes and sizes which she hoped would survive in that river water.  She’d make them ram the castles to misdirect the shooting.  Just for fun.  She made her men work in groups and go fast so they could all reach their goal in time.  But just in case, on one side, she made sure all kinds of creatures left their pond, to start walking, running, and crawling, over to the river, to interfere, to distract the players, inside the castles.

And while all these fun and games were delighting his children, the tired father stepped away to hide in the shade.  He fell asleep, and dreamed.  He dreamed of a dagger ear, a harp playing a ukelele, of arrows shooting through people, of boats, of jelly fish, so much more — all floating in and out of sight, and somehow under water, under shooting stars over a small island.

Of course, in the end, even the kids got tired, woke up their father, said they ready to go.  They handed back the remotes at the exit.  Then, back home, tried to explain the whole thing to their Mom.  She was so confused they ended up just making a painting for her.

Lavinia Kumar

Lavinia Kumar’s book, Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists, consists of short prose pieces of near 100 remarkable women writers, poets, publishers, painters, sculptors, abolitionists, suffragettes, and activists — primarily pre-Civil War.. Her three poetry books & four chapbooks include two about women. Her poems and flash fiction appear in a variety of poetry journals & three anthologies (most recently, Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War, 2026).  She’s received four Pushcart and one Best of the Net nominations. Media: laviniakumar.net & lasummer.substack.com

**

Reversing Out of the Garden

Evil isn’t the end
Nor is it eternity
It’s the fight worth having
A battle for balancing
A wreck towards recentering

It breeds the middle
Of delicate members
Where pains and pleasures
Blend seductive mixtures
Into an intoxication of pictures

That we remember
And attribute to sinners
Whose shame starts naively
In long chains of deceiving
Until we close doors on believing

Only then do we understand
This globe is guided by commands
And all is written, not assumed
Ipse dixit et facta sunt
Ipse mandavit et creata sunt

Brendan Dawson

Brendan Dawson is an American born writer based in Italy. He writes from his observations and experiences while living, working, and traveling abroad. Currently, he is compiling a collection of poetry and short stories from his time in the military and journey as an expat.

**

On Knowing

Recall, I cannot, the grey of before
just a warning: all except this
Left in a beautiful bubble
the lure of cool waters
bare skin washed clean, again
warmed by sun and touch of a man
How could I have known?
the depth of our longing, limitless now
Ripe berries stain my mouth, sticky sweetness clinging
to bodies that yearn and feast of this new knowing
Feasting. Thirsting near fountains, their endless supply,
Relieves and Refills
insatiable, craving, taking this all in
I need to know what He knows
caught in defiance, my nature exposed
Succumbed to the trap He left me
Cast out. Evil? betrayal guised as surprise
Now, somewhere else. Fated.
to sour notes, forever out of attunement
mauled, pursued, devoured, afraid.
ladders to nowhere, splintered and broken
Creation undone and undoing
flesh He once cherished, sacrificed for his entertainment.
Are You delighted, yet?

Julia Harr

Julia Harr is a narrative practitioner who lives in Queens, NY. She is happiest browsing the many art collections of NYC and writing shorts and poems in response. Professionally, you can find her practicing narrative therapy and offering narrative medicine workshops to other healthcare providers. www.story-ethic.com

**

Inspired by the Final Panel of his Namesake’s Painting, Detective Harry Bosch Pens a Poem*

In the dark hours,
in the lost light,
there is a darkness
more than night.

Tracy Royce

*This is a cento composed of book titles in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series.

Tracy Royce is a writer and poet with work appearing in 100 Word Story and The Ekphrastic Review, and forthcoming in Hot Flash Literary, Heavy Feather Review, and Best Microfiction (2026). Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Touchstone Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys hiking and watching Richard Widmark films. You can find her on Bluesky.

**

The Dome

At lunchtime, Greck went to The Dome, a seaside amusement arcade. The buildings on either side had collapsed into rubble years ago, but The Dome survived, patronised by a mix of the elderly and unemployed. Most of these locals played the fruit machines; Greck, however, headed to the smell of fried food in a corner. From behind a counter, a man named Besco passed her chips in a polystyrene container and milky tea in a polystyrene cup. Greck nodded and placed the exact amount of money on the counter. She then squeezed ketchup on the chips and walked back out of The Dome to a bench.

Greck chewed her chips, sipped her tea and stared at the calm sea. It had begun to recede from the stones, sand and seaweed that constituted the town’s beach. At her back, she heard two people emerge from The Dome.

“I hit the jackpot, but the machine didn’t pay out,” someone said.

“We don’t pay money. We give tokens.”

“No tokens came out either.”

“Don’t make trouble. Go home.”

Silence followed this response.

Another dissatisfied customer and Besco, Greck thought and finished her lunch. She dropped the container and cup into the mesh bin that stood nearby but didn't leave. A wooden crate on the beach had caught her attention.

Washed ashore from where? she wondered.

The crate lay on a tangle of seaweed and looked intact. Greck stood and strolled towards it.

“Leave it,” came a shout. “Whatever’s in the crate, it’s mine. Everything that washes up on this beach is mine.”

Greck halted and stepped to one side to avoid Besco as he hurried by her. She watched him kick the crate several times before he picked up a stone and used it as a hammer. The crate splintered and fell apart. Besco immediately pulled out cardboard boxes and ripped one open.

“I hope my luck has changed,” he said to himself.

The items that fell from the box, though, looked like placemats to Greck. She moved closer.

Exasperated, Besco glared at her. “What are these things?”

“Placemats,” Greck replied.

“What? Do I need useless placemats? No, I don’t.”

Greck shrugged. “You could always put them on tables, together with cutlery, for your lunchtime trade.”

Besco grabbed some of the boxes and threw them at Greck’s feet.

“Don’t you dare make fun of me,” he shouted. “You’re barred from The Dome, for life.”

He spat and brushed past Greck. She ignored him, bent down and looked through the boxes. They all contained placemats. Each one had a laminated picture on one side and cork on the other. Greck recognised the pictures as scenes from a well-known triptych.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, she thought and gathered as many placemats as she could carry. At the sea’s edge, she put them in the water, picture side up. They floated.

Greck glanced back at The Dome and removed her clothes. With care, she lowered herself across the placemats and drifted away with the tide.

K.J. Watson

K. J. Watson’s stories and poems have appeared on the radio; in magazines, comics and anthologies; and online.

**

The Demise of Bosch While The Poet Endures

Every form, every style, every
step toward new expression eluded him. The poem
seizes the opportunity where the painter’s symbols end. “This is
the crux of the matter,” cries the poet: “We saw the Event finished
in the Garden before the painter laid his strokes—no one understood at
what point in time.” Is this truly the style, the substance, the
release the artist desired? Or does the deceased one mock the poet’s
blood-red hands? Many wage artistic battles, few regard the expense.

Carole Mertz

(The poem, a Golden Shovel, borrows its line from Octavio Paz’s “Toward the Poem.”)

Carole Mertz publishes reviews, essays, and poetry at The Ekphrastic Review, Oyster River Pages, Cleaver Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Color and Line published in 2021. Carole teaches organ and piano in Parma, Ohio.

**

In Praise of Hieronymus Bosch

Ladies and gentlemen, Pieter Brueghel the Elder here, Master of Ceremonies. We’ve gathered at the Prado in Madrid to praise my muse, Hieronymus Bosch. We never met, but his meticulous attention to minutiae, his genius, inspired me to craft small stories within a single canvas. I’ve assembled a triptych of artists to attest to his talent. Salvador, please start us off.

I. I am Dali! My wife and I thank you, Señor Bosch, for your twisted mind on which I have based the twist of my mustache. The way you take ordinary, earthly things and dement them. You are my guiding light!

II.                 I am Miró. I used to paint like everyone else. Until I considered your winged altarpiece in the Prado. I could take individual objects and paint them the way I see them. Distorted. Dissonant. Disconnected. Dare I say diabolical? I am forever indebted.

III. Leonora Carrington here. Publicly I’ve stated that The Pleasures of Dagobert is loosely based on the Merovingian king of that name. Publicly I’ve stated that my creation sprang to mind as a result of the war. But, dear Hieronymus, not one brushstroke would have been possible without Garden of Earthly Delights as phantasmagorical precedent. I scrutinized your work. Imagined little spheres of debauchery owning their own section of the canvas. My work could not exist without yours as exemplar. Bravo!

My dear friends and colleagues, let us bow our heads in praise of Hieronymus Bosch. Thank you for bringing us into your garden of unearthly delights.

Barbara Krasner

Barbara Krasner is a huge fan of Brueghel and surrealist art. A self-professed art junkie, she is addicted to art museum exhibitions and has a fear of missing out. She is currently shopping a Brueghel-inspired chapbook and putting the finishing touches on a full-length poetry collection written in response to female surrealists. Visit her at www.barbarakrasner.com.

**

Angel

The gardens rest as loneliness fills the space
unconquered, broken into palatable shapes,
we argue, only to fill time, to find peace.

Unsure of anything but to disrupt the scene
a senseless lake, hordes of skin in salad days
a preference made at the beginning of time.

Now, a thousand years later, or two
I remember your words, wept into stone
and I try to instill them, to fill my remaining days.

Zachary Thraves

Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer. His poems have been published by Broken Sleep Books, Juste Millieu, Nitrogen House and at Poetry Worth Hearing. His plays have been performed internationally and in 2023 he created a one-man fringe show exploring his experience with bi-polar, in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. Zac also co-hosts a podcast. He lives with his partner in East Sussex. Find him on Bluesky @28hary.

**

A Not So Distant World

Intricate palaces surrounding the lake,
each different, yet still the same.
Decorated in pastels.
mimicking flower petals.

Lively gardens, full of entertainment.
It can be found in every nook.

Berry floats and butterflies that
rest on flowers between dances.

The races have started.
Animals run laps, getting
distracted by each other
and the nymphs in the middle.

The nymphs in the pond
watch and giggle at
the people running laps around them.
They create groups amongst themselves,
distributing racers to each one.
Ensuring all racers can be picked at.

A world of our own.
Yet, still so very
distant
from what we know.

Angelina Carago

Angelina Carago is an American writer who writes from fabricated worlds. She can often be found surrounded by books and art.

**

Trying To Find Earthly Delights In Kenya

The girl's hair
falls soft, breezy like the palms
soaked in evening's light.

Air brewed with fragrant heat
becomes lush tea -- tinged with clouds
splintering into cinnamon.

Its mood makes her drowsy

along with the elephants
she has come to photograph.

Wise yet lethargic --
with lake and insect life
stirring between their gray sculptures,
they remember the ancient.

Days never shadowed
by the herdsman's cloak
or his wand prodding the bell-shackled
oxen  or cattle,

Days of red dust swept by wind
and then clearing to trees
where moonlight stretched through leaves

whispering under the clear sky, blessed
by the watchful eye of Opala.

Yet, within the skin of the elephant,
she sees the wrinkled map
of a town back home, her lover seething

on a leather couch, sipping time
from a brown hour glass of  beer
somewhere between their moon
and a suburb of  Kansas city.

The air stills. She turns
and silence translucent
as the powder on her face
blends with the soft, sifted gold
of sundown.

Tusks play quarter moons
to dragonflies skimming

the water's edge for diversion. Her nerves
caught in the shimmer of their wings.

Wendy Howe

Note: Opala is the goddess of the moon in Massai/Kenyan
mythology. She is known to be the protector of women and
nature.

Wendy Howe is an English teacher who lives in California. Her poetry reflects her interest in myth,, women in conflict and history. Landscapes that influence her writing include the seacoast and high desert where she has formed a poetic kinship with the Joshua trees, hills and wild life spanning ravens, lizards and coyotes. She has been published in the following journals: The Poetry Salzburg Review, The Interpreter's House, Corvid Queen, Strange Horizons, The Acropolis Journal and many others.

**

The Garden of Earthly Delight

When I lived in Madrid, I used to visit The Garden of Earthly Delight weekly. The Prado and I had a date every Monday at 10.00 am, before the hordes arrived. I wanted to dive into Hieronymus Bosch’s mind, discover the myriad of images, trying to understand a surrealist masterpiece created in the Late Middle Ages. Dalí, eat your heart out. I always started to ‘read’ this wonder the way it was meant to be read: from left to right, starting at The Garden of Eden where God takes Eve’s hand to introduce her to Adam, where strange animals roam, including an elephant, a giraffe (how did Bosch know about these animals in 1500 in Den Bosch, Brabant, a province of what is now The Netherlands?), what I took to be a unicorn, a variety of birds and a cat doing its cat-thing to a big mouse, a bird swallowing a frog—perhaps a hint at darker things to come. In the middle of it all is the Fountain of Living Waters, a science-fiction fever dream from 1500.

The centre panel is The Garden of Earthly Delights. I always felt that Bosch used the title of his panel to explain his phantasies: "earthly’." From giant flora and fauna to bizarre architecture to some very naked frolicking, men riding the beasts of base animal instincts. There is lust again: very suggestive play and giant fruit, in other words indulgence and the fleeting nature of pleasure. More fever-dream creatures and some disapproval by the painter, I believe, leading us to the Musical Hell, a nickname given by art historians to the Night Garden, the third and final panel of this amazing work.

Here we find the nightmare of heavenly punishments for the indulgences of the centre panel: the pale man beast, wearing a flat ‘hat’ on which some creatures are dancing around a pink swollen bagpipe-like apparition, his body a cracked eggshell, this man seems to be the observer. The party is over. A bird-headed monster devours humans, shitting them out into a dark pit, instruments are torture devices: one sinner is trapped under a giant lute while musical notes are being tattooed on his backside; other sinners are falling into black water while fires are burning in the background.

In the lower right-hand corner is a pig dressed as a nun stretching its snout as if to kiss a man who definitely doesn’t want to be kissed, while another watches in horror. This part of the triptych is where I thought I’d just about began to understand Bosch a wee bit: he depicted mankind's lust and hypocrisy. Bosch turned objects meant for "heavenly" harmonies into tools of agony, a reflection, I thought, of what man does onto man. In the three panels of The Garden of Earthly Delight, Bosch is turning on the warning lights. The Last Judgment will come, but for now mankind is stuck in a cycle of lust, self-indulgence, and sado-masochistic pleasures.

And when you close the triptych, there is the world before man spoiled it: a world where the earth was just sky, land, water, and plants. Still innocent, pure. And Bosch knew that she was round.

Rose Mary Boehm

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, short stories, eight poetry collections and one chapbook, her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a several times Pushcart and a Best of Net nominee. All her recent books are available on Amazon. The new chapbook, The Matter of Words, was published in June 2025, and a new full-length collection has been slated for publishing in 2027. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

**

To Hieronymus Bosch Regarding Garden of Earthly Delights

You circumscribe existence shown
as you believe it to be known --
time seen as task of God afar
begun as darkness given star

for firmanent and clime of earth
in stillness of its virgin birth
that would entwine as measured course
with beasts evolving into source

of circumstance unleashing man
as image God became by plan
to be the consciousness aware
cogniton would become by dare

the conscience of eternal soul
to suffer burden of conlrol
awaiting everlasting fate,
immortal hope or Hell to hate.

By use exquisite of detail
you here expose how we prevail
not seeming gathered to survive,
but seeking pleasure to derive,

revering falsely our disdain
now disregarding fact of chain
whose strength is but its weakest link
where disrespect is armor's chink

despite this warning we discern
inside the doors you have us turn.

Portly Bard

Portly Bard: Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.

**

Diversions

Although I pretend otherwise, I have no illuminaton to provide, no
idea how to make the future easier to deal with, anticipate, or
understand. I can’t tell you what will help you, although I have
plenty of ideas about what will hurt. But let me show you the
nightmare of my dreams--all of the possible answers rephrased into new
more irrational questions, or maybe old questions reconfigured to
stray further from solution into delusion, each new detail more
incoherent and incomprehensible than the one before.

Merely a conduit for your wishful thinking, I am both unable and
unwilling to resist the charms and chaos of human folly—the empty
promises, the flattery that pretends to affirmation, that mixes
fantasy with reality, that offers only fabrications grounded in a
false faith of invincibility, riddles entwined with vagaries meant to
distract from the truth.

I cannot save you—in fact I do not care about you at all--but I can
entertain you as you fall into the abyss.

dreams of hereafter--
a leaf trembling in the wind
on bare black branches

Kerfe Roig

Kerfe Roig: "I've written a few poems to this work of art. It seems always to reflect whatever world we happen to be living in."

**

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