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Ekphrastic Responses: Hildegard von Bingen

8/26/2022

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Picture
Vision of the Last Days, by Hildegard von Bingen (Germany) before 1179

Hildegard’s Vision, 12th C.
 
Most disturbing of this visionary’s mimesis are the animals
with their tongues licking
a sticky, slimy plant, sprung perhaps
      from a darkly ocean deep.
 
The similar plant, fingerlike
appears again in the lower right,
tentacled and shedding a frightening
      and toothy guise.
 
The lady figure blesses them all--
blesses the frightful face, blesses the four figures
looking up curious
      but unafraid.
 
Von Bingen has travelled her mystic path;
her way is bumpy, her house non-plussed.
She has arrived at the acme
sharing her viriditas and cosmic vision
      while singing and blessing us.

Carole Mertz

Carole Mertz, interviewer, poet, and essayist, has recent work at Abandoned Mine, Adanna 2022 print journal, Dreamer’s Creative Writing, and River Teeth. Her meta poem “Invited to Linger” was a finalist in the Ars Poetica 2022 Contest at Riddled with Arrows. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Carole is preparing an essay on poet Robert Miltner’s use of the caesura. Carole is Editorial Assistant with Kalisto Gaia Press.

**
​


Visions of Light
 
Abbess in solitude, Mother Superior, your poems
transform mere words—prophetic lyrics wrapped
around musical notes—quaint compositions denoting
devotion, pervading the few yet desired by multitudes
seeking holy sights & hallowed cathedrals to exalt liturgy--
echoing resplendent plainchant, curbing cardinal temptation. 
 
Magistra Hildegard, High Middle Age philosopher
dancing among shadows in a stone floor abbey,
I study you full of awe & admiration; Benedictine simplicity 
embraces natural history rooted in science, theology 
compatible alternative medicine, holistic wellness relished 
by recipients of your herbal remedies & mystic prayers.
 
Sibyl of the Rhine, I listen to your sacred monophony
channel cosmic laws, know you supervised Scivias
artisans crafting miniature illuminations stamping mandela
paintings with gestalt immediacy, feverishly kept experience— 
watching & being seen by a deity; now, bless my imagination, 
let prescient mysteries inform lingering questions, baptize any doubt.
 
Saintly scribe, share visions of five peaks, ebon ropes, tethered 
beasts facing west: sans grace, a fiery dog burns, yellow lion 
urges war, pale & horse snubs good works; meantime, black pig 
misery & muddy impurity touch grey wolf shoulders—dividing, 
conquering, plundering—son of perdition’s wicked jowls snapping 
above heads, rending & seducing while you chastise deception
 
Von Bingen, I hear you; I know you; I admire your awareness--
spiritually grounded "reflection of the living Light”—your open 
hands beckon, etch The Last Days & the Fall of the Antichrist
in my mind like a gilded rendering, divine revelations preserved 
for millennia as you champion redemption & guide salvation 
each epoch’s deliverance bathed in righteous blood & compassion.

Sterling Warner

An award-winning Washington-based author, poet, and educator, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including Down in the Dirt, Shot Glass Journal, Danse Macabre, Ekphrastic Review, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner’s collections of poetry include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori, Serpent’s Tooth, and Flytraps: Poems (2022)—as well as Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Currently, Warner writes, participates in “virtual” poetry readings, and enjoys retirement in Washington.

**

Reversals 
 
The clouds spend their words on prophecy. 
The knob-nosed ogre with fine-tuned foam
Across its forehead converses with the Lovely
With hair ribboned by the wind--
Silhouette of air and mist. 
An angel hovers overhead in a slurry of sparrows
Gray in the rose setting of the sun
Passing the moon on its rising. 
Vision of the end of days. 
A revision: black to white 
White to black in a negative snapshot
With a snap of fingers strumming the twines of vines.  
Disembodied hands, gnawed by creatures 
With dentilated smiles, reach for the skies
In the midst of transforming woman 
Into man in the lap of loins. 
In ascent to the castle, fortunes amassed 
Descend in the ridding of greeded goods.
And the beasts surpass man to become the pinnacles
Of being, assuming their rightful place on the land, 
Devouring a feast of grazing. 
The world will not end, simply reverse its spin.
The end of days is the final vision--
With the loss of pattern
And the absence of art in our imagination. 

Cynthia Dorfman

Cynthia Dorfman has practiced ekphrastic writing as a frequent participant in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery writing program. She has been a writer, editor, publications director and communications manager in the public and private sectors. Her creative work has appeared on line and in print with the most recent, a short story in The Library Love Letter. In the summers she lives in an old shoe factory in Wisconsin, USA.

**

That Light Though Faint

At first in child, then forty years, 
bedimmed a Light illumined fears
that death would be to soul unchaste
forever discontent of waste

thus laid to promise given those
of peace eternal in repose
awaiting promised honor paid
for purity of course they stayed

and vision they by skill enshrined
in word, and song, and art refined
as testaments so well distilled
that argued conduct being willed

by glimmer of that Light though faint
begetting glow of cherished saint.

Portly Bard

Old man.  Ekphrastic fan.

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.

**


Which Beast, Then

Which beast, then,
Will find me last--
 
My mouth open, holding for an August raspberry,
stuffed instead by November’s creeping wolf--
blackmatted fur, thrusting hot, 
smelling of bitumen and rotting onions
 
Or thornedcane spirals,
split lizard tongues wrapped
around my fingers that minutes ago 
lifted new eggs from nesting boxes
 
Or shaggyslack jaw, redeye,
leering teeth groinhung, panting soul clamped tight 
to my blank-eyed angel 
who still holds to heaven,
not knowing how, or when.

Denise Wilbur

Denise Wilbur is a lifelong educator who has recently left the world of schools, claiming that time and open space to write. 


**

Hildegard’s World: The Secret of the Rose Window

Precious Hildegard, when you entered this world,
A magic millennium was also being born. 
Greece’s glory had faded.
Centuries of thinkers disappeared after explaining
Beauty, truth, logic, rhetoric, and the different kinds of love.
The Romans were gone too, leaving their solid bridges, aqueducts
And the old church in Bamberg behind, 
Along with their stodgy marble gods, resembling no one but themselves.
Your world, Hildegard, was filled with upward-flowing light,
With angels everywhere, soaring on deep lapis blue wings, their haloes aglow,
Through the realm of dreams, visions, miracles, symbols and saints.
Demons, dragons, beasts, serpents, and wolves inhabited this same
Stratosphere, along with the secret sounds germinating in the Black Forest
Where the elves and the fairies lived.
And all were real, as real as bridges, 
As authentic as thoughts.
But the greatest beings in your world
Were Mary, emerged from the shadows, now wrapped in her blue mantle,
Ruling the sky and the sea and sitting beside Her shining, golden Son.
Hildegard, you belonged in this new reality,
You and your music, your Responsories, played on the psaltery at mass,
Your fragrant garden, filled with blue rosemary and healing, greening herbs.
You lived in this swirling circle of color, where the chant of
Women’s voices lifted like bells, linked together in a dancing daisy chain
Of yellow light, pink and crimson light, claiming dawn and dusk,
The green light of fragrant mountain pines and summer chestnut leaves.
Your world was Mary’s world, the place where stones were transformed
Into towers, into spires that aspired to reach the circle
Where the cloud of witnesses surrounded the very throne of God.
Under the towers, the turrets and the spires of these new temples of sacred stone,
The rose windows, built in your lifetime, carried light from the farthest star
Into the darkest crypt, casting the demons into obscurity.
The vision you left to help us see the Last Days as you perceived them
Is as symmetrical as the thoughts that created the Greek temples and the Roman roads.
Surrounded by swirls of golden light with eighteen roses linked in a tall rectangle,
You saw two rooms above, one room below, tightly confined, chaos and order at war.
One upper room is filled with beasts. In the adjoining room,
She sits in the high tower, bathed in golden light, her arms lifted in prayer.
In the room below, He, crowned with gold, also reaches up, sharing his space
With demons and fire. His feet lift from the floor; his face is unafraid.
Both of these Holy Ones know the Rose Windows’ secret: No matter how much space
The demons occupy, no darkness can overcome a Rose Window’s light.

Rose Anna Higashi
 
Rose Anna Higashi taught Japanese Literature, English Literature, Poetry and Creative Writing at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, California, for thirty-five years. Upon retirement, she was commissioned by the Catholic Bishop of San Jose to serve as a Lay Ecclesial Minister. She held this position for nine years as Director of Adult Religious Education at St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Parish in Los Gatos. She now lives in the ancient Hawaiian village of Kaaawa in rural Oahu with her husband, Wayne Higashi. They hope to celebrate their sixtieth anniversary in 2023. Rose Anna’s poetry journal, Blue Wings, was published by Paulist Press, and many of her lyric poems and haiku can be viewed on her website, myteaplanner.com, co-written with her niece, Kathleen Pedulla. This website also contains Rose Anna’s monthly blog, “Tea and Travels.” Her poems and essays have also appeared in a variety of other publications, including The Avocet, The California Quarterly, Caesura, Poets Online, Agape Review, The Catholic Poetry Room on the Integrated Catholic Life website, and the college English textbooks, Visions Across the Americas and Thresholds.

​**


What to Bring to the Last Days
 
Bring operatic visions
of chain-tongued lions,
lizards, and wolverines
who shore up
the dying tree.
 
Bring music from
the firmament
whose toothy stars
exude a green river  
before the vagabond choir.
 
Bring the reclamation
of toppled bridges
and the gestures 
of scholastic saviors
as yet unborn.
 
Bring blood pooling
in your extremities
as you straddle evil
with no bone left
unturned.

Lisa Vihos

The poems of Lisa Vihos have appeared in many poetry journals, both print and online. She has published four chapbooks, and has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and numerous awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. She is a founding editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and the Sheboygan organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. In 2020, she was named the first poet laureate of Sheboyganwhere she hosts the podcast Poetry on Air for Mead Public Library. Her first novel, The Lone Snake: The Story of Sofonisba Anguissola, was released in May, 2022 from Water’s Edge Press.

​**

Reflections of the Living Light                         

                                      "For people rise and set like the sun..."
                                                                                     Hildegard von Bingen, Vision Xl

                                     "I've got the world on a string, sittin' on a rainbow,
                                     Got the string around my finger ..."
                                                                                     as performed by Frank Sinatra
                                                                                     (songwriters Harold Arlen / Ted Koehler)

Nature guided her.    The soul in the body was like sap rising in a tree.
During an Animal Guide meditation    she had seen a bristling boar,

looking just as he had on the banner    fluttering in the wind over King Arthur's
ship, the Prydwen, as it sailed into the underworld    to capture the Hallows

of Britain. It must have been the winter solstice    sun rising over the water
on the east coast of Ireland at Newgrange    because snow had fallen

like chalk dust on the back of the boar    before she realized he was only
a javelina she'd seen on a family trip to south Texas.   But the dreamlike

meditation continued, and she wondered if the pig     was in danger
when a golden lion     sprang from a medieval picture,  Vision

of The Last Days     created by Hildegard von Bingen, her stylized
lion squeezed  into a window-box    in the drawing with the pig,

a pale stallion, a fiery dog and a white wolf    all 5 animals attached by strings
to 5 mountain tops that resemble branches    of quaint medieval vegetation.

At the base of a monster-like botanical Antichrist    (SE of the 5 animals
who lived in the North)    the 4 Evangelists wonder what else will change

in the last days of their world.    John had been an Eagle, Luke, a Cow;
Mark had been the Lion;    and Matthew, originally a serpent

like some ancient Beelzebub    had been transformed to an Angel
with the advent of Christianity.    Like a breeze in their ears,

they could hear God's voice in the trees;   His promise in the healer's
hands -- the hands of Hildegard von Bingen --    a woman who worked

with tinctures, herbs and precious stones;    who knew blood-letting --
the fluid red as liquid fire --    had the power of the bloodstone

and should only be done     when the moon was full, when the voice
of living light guided her hands    as it had done since she was 8 --

2.
                            The light which I see...is not spatial; but it is far , far 
                            brighter than a cloud which carries the sun.  I can measure
                            neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it
                           ' the reflection of the living Light.'  And as the sun, the moon,
                            and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues
                            and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.
                        
                                                                             Hildegard von Bingen

The animals are guiding me backward.    Together, we cross time
in my mother's story --    and I am falling from the mountaintop

of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase.    A book with a red and gold spine
falls open to the Crusades --    a page where King Richard

the Lionheart is returning to save England;    and alone, my mother
prays to God to save me, unconscious.    There are no bargains,

but she strikes a bargain    holding me up like an offering, bartering
to give me a Father.     And what marketplace is this, where a boy

pulls a sword, Caliburn, from a stone    and becomes the True King
because he is pure of heart?     & why did God, like a judge, hear my mother,

and wake me, gentle as a dove's wing   feathers folded in the shape
of a living harp, the music in its strings    leaving marks, a staff (thy rod

and thy staff, they comfort me)    in an illumination --  A Vision 
of The Last Days    where a crowned figure rises --  body suspended,

as on a cross, while Hildegard von Bingen    watches from a broken tower,
its stones shaped like the teeth of an open zipper    in a space

she has imagined, a purgatory where sins are absolved    and I will live
to be 7 -- a year younger than the visionary artist     when I began to see

God's golden rings -- circles pointing out    what a Father
                                                                            wants to show his daughter.
                                                 
Laurie Newendorp

Laurie Newendorp lives and writes in Houston.  Her psychic energy is low in these troubled days in the 21st century, a shadowed time in history; but the golden rings of light are true to her life story. The first she remembers appeared around a rock, broken open to a clear crystal centre on the school playground in Austin, Texas, circa 1952. The painting can be read differently, of course. It could represent the first and second coming, the spirit of Christ the King rising as Jesus of Nazareth watches from a broken tower, two fingers raised in blessing at the top of the painting, from that place where the sun rises in the east.

**

Without Your Faith

I have no way to understand my visions, that come and come like an avalanche, unstoppable, bright as the sun on new snow, heavy as stone, sharp enough to cut, like knives of ice. You saw hope, old promises, something you could trust, forgiveness enough for rescue from the beasts of the apocalypse.

But I can not bend, curtsey or genuflect, see only the sly monster beneath those holy robes, choke on the scent and smoke of burning bodies, the ash silting up the streets of paradise. You heard the stars singing, their arms uplifted, their faces lit, like the moon, with a reflected glory. I hear only silence, beneath the faint electric hum of dust, sand blowing in the desert wind.

Without your faith I am cold, comfortless, stubborn and dense as stone, alone even in this great congregation, pilgrims on the road to some New Jerusalem, a golden city only they can see.

And yet I cannot look away, unsee these strange figures, a splendor spread across the sky. I have no names for them, no explanation, but there they are, alive, a pantheon of miracles, a gift or punishment, a shining regiment of gods and angels, waiting for me, ready for the promised armageddon.

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy has always been in love with words. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Ekphrastic World,  edited by Lorette C. Luzajic,  The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, and  recent issues of Third Wednesday, Earth's Daughters and Gyroscope. She has been a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.

​**

Sights and Sounds of St. Hildegard’s Vision of the Last Days

St. Hildegard enlightens millennia with
a medieval arcana of visionary images,
foretelling the apocalypse. To embrace her
we relearn a symbolic language.
The three panels of the miniature painting
“Last Days” weave together her revelation of
struggle between darkness of 
sharp toothed evil and salvation.

Her powerful, wordless narrative
flows from scene to scene.
A lexicon of medieval symbols offers
a surfeit of wretchedness,
corruption of humanity and nature,
wonders of redemption, faith, truth, and
durance of the Divine City.
We decipher and recipher the epic story;
revise her eloquent twelfth century imagery to
the verbal semaphore of our language.

In a postmodern mode, her story evolves
with past present future blended.
In abbreviated history, five wild beasts
enwrap the past with ghastly long tongues.
A fiendish antichrist emerges from
the womb of the golden mother,
grows large and menacing on a mountain top.
Virtue confronts the excremental demon with
a fulgent burst of heavenly lightning.
The monstrous, spidery creature is destroyed.
We are terrified, huddled together 
the midst of Armageddon.

St. Hildegard’s “End of Days” is
an elaborate graphic design,
a vivid compressed chronicle of
portent and dangers of secular life and
hope for future salvation.
But there is so much more:
look and listen…

She accepts no sonic or graphic boundaries in
her expression of the cosmic, eternal divine.
The visual and aural imagery are creations 
unrestricted by form or formula.
While viewing St. Hildegard’s exotic miniatures,
her spiritually profound, unique music
pulses in our hearts and expands imagination.
St. Hildegard’s eloquent, monophonic music resonates. 
Plangent threnody and elegant, graceful chant
enhance and illuminate her mystical icons.
In the “Last Days” vision
an agile melisma throbs in ecstasy.
Her beautiful chants are filled with love and
sing of harmonious, ageless perfection.

St. Hildegard’s many manuscript visions and 
musical offerings open insights into 
her era and our own time.
They dispel moral confusion,
enlighten turgid politics, 
subdue the lethargy of timorous thoughts and
reduce the carnage of daily violence.
In our millennium, her music and visual 
reflections offer amity and inner peace.

Ben Sackmary

Ben Sackmary is a lifelong writer of mostly poetry. Now retired after decades of college teaching (not literature), he has the time to devote to poetry that the art form deserves. He has no career interest in poetry and writes mainly for himself and friends.

**

The Stubborn Pursuit of Pleasure 
with My Unvaccinated Lover

 
My nightmare—fiery
dog, pale horse, and a grey wolf
licking their last licks
on a sprawling trunk at dusk.
Terror begins when they 
see my naked, thin figure,
a body Giacometti
might have bronze-casted for a
promised-green turf. Life’s lost tongue.
 
The vagabond face
between the robed spirit’s
legs masks a warning. I want
a breath to find my 
clothes. Rope tugs from the mouth, oh
that animal-stupid want!

John Milkereit

John Milkereit resides in Houston, Texas working as a mechanical engineer and has completed a M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop. His work has appeared in various literary journals including Naugatuck River Review, Panoply, San Pedro River Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. His next full-length collection of poems, A Place Comfortable with Fire, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press.

**

Doctor of the Church
 
It was during the High Middle Ages. Women were the keepers of the house, the carers of families, the obedient wives of husbands.  Hildegard von Bingen knew that, if she wanted to use her intellect and her talents as a woman, there was only one place: a convent. And she thrived. Polymath, composer, mystic, visionary, writer… Mother Superior, founder of natural history, purveyor of ecstasy. Hildegard von Bingen, the most accomplished of scientific women, lived for the reflection of the ‘living light’, the God who had clearly endowed her with a superior brain, music and rapture. She was never officially canonized, even though Saint Hildegard has been part of Church lore for centuries. The holiness of her life was never in doubt. When they made her ‘Doctor of the Church’, her intellectual achievements were finally recognized. Would that female scientists, composers, teachers today were thus enabled and elevated. 

Songs of ecstasy
Correspondence with kings
Fulfillment

Rose Mary Boehm

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as six poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? has been published by Kelsay Books in July 2022. Also on Amazon the very latest: Whistling in the Dark, published by Taj Mahal Publishing House in August 2022. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

**


Vision of the Last Days

We tied the beasts by their tongues in the upper chamber, hoping to keep them quiet. The dogs couldn’t bolt when the demon arrived, but they did gag out tiny barking noises. The unicorn, outraged, stamped on the head of the nearest dog. He reared back, pulling on his tongue, trying to tear himself free and get at the other dogs. Bright red blood gushed from his mouth. 

Hildegard was oblivious to all the commotion. She had considered her work finished earlier and retired after lunch to the attic. There she dawdled with her doll castle and listened to her transistor radio.
That, of course, left only me to deal with the devil’s disciple, who snarled at me, his face black with rage, his clawed hands clinching rhythmically at the air. As my subjects cowered near the edge of the great hall, my mind emptied, blank with fear. I had absolutely no idea what to do. But somehow, I began to sway in time with the angry motion of the demon’s hands. This must have startled him, for he abruptly stopped and looked at me intently. I stood very still. We stared at each other for an awful, awkward moment. It really did seem like an eternity. Then I did a little barefoot shuffle, some automatic, unconscious dance step dredged from childhood classes. I lifted my arms and spread my voluminous golden sleeves in a gentle, languorous arc. I smiled.

“Do you like my codpiece?” I asked.

Barry Basden

Barry Basden lives in the Texas hill country with his wife and Bean, their little rescue terrier.

**

The Mystery of Umbra Viventis Lucis 

Are we doomed to troll through Wikipedia or other google sites
for enlightenment? Would that we could summon Hildegard herself 
to explain the grotesque figures drawn with hints 

of a childish hand: monsters and cowering little people
and the levitating king-figure with a face in his crotch.
And what of the strange animals with their long, notched tongues

licking what could be slender fingers or just as easily
the tentacles of an octopus, and the man/woman
who appears to be teetering on razor blades? (no wonder 

he/she’s got their fingers crossed). Between you and me, I suspect 
a learned type or two will want to extol the picture’s depth of meaning 
without actually having a clue, something they certainly

won’t be admitting to any time soon. But Pope Eugenius
was impressed and said You go girl!..get that shit out there- or
I imagine papal words to that effect - (Hildy: talk about raising your profile

in one fell swoop!)         Personally, 
I’d like to speak with Hildegard. And ask about the relationship
to god/the universe or whatever spiritual magic she was birthed with maybe

as a caul around her. Too bad she died so long ago, farewelled,
by all reports, by two streams of light appearing across the skies
to cross the room where she lay dying.       I believe.

Though thousands wouldn’t.

Linda McQuarrie-Bowerman

Linda is a Poet living in Lake Tabourie, NSW Australia. She’s been writing poetry since April 2021, with formal qualifications in Business Management and Personal Training. She is just beginning her Arts Degree in Creative Writing. She has recently been published in three anthologies, on Viewless Wings.com, in The Ekphrastic Review, with a poem forthcoming in the next edition of the Star 82 Review. Linda adores animals, family, and good champagne not necessarily in that order.

**

Visions
 
The abbess dipped her brush in the crimson and carefully dabbed in an eye. The monster winked at her. She filled in the other eye. Black pupils bored into hers, and she turned away for a moment to clear the vision. She had been gifted with visions since she was a small child and they called her Hildegard. The name had faded, but she had the visions still. 
 
Her fingers itched to continue. Paint us. Give us life. There was more crimson needed for the demon’s tongue. The abbess added three tiny brush strokes. She had been worried that the visions were sinful, but the archbishop had encouraged her to set them down in her books. Not sinful then. But disturbing. Distressing sometimes. 
 
She changed brushes. Ochre. The prince’s breeches. The monster’s head was between the prince’s legs. Why did he have a demon in the place of his manly parts? She sighed. An allegory possibly. Men’s urges. Though the times were reasonably calm, even if the English were still fighting one another. They had no king, hadn’t had one for as long as she could remember. And the Pope was calling for another crusade. 
 
The abbess looked at the red-eyed monster, black, hair like serpents. Evil, but not a Saracen, she decided. They worshiped one god, not like the Heathens. They were simply fighters. It was their land after all. The men fought and the women prayed. It was the same the world over.

She thought for a moment about the Saracen women, praying, cloistered and veiled just as she was. But in their houses, fountains played in colonnaded courtyards, and birds sang in cool shaded gardens. Their husbands and fathers watched the stars and made maps of the heavens. Did their women watch too and wonder with them? She would have done, if she had been able. She hoped her Saracen-sisters did.
 
She had never known her own sisters. Hildegard had been given into God’s service when she was too young to remember, and her occupations had always been those of God’s handmaiden. She had been observed night and day. Protected from evil.
 
Green this time. The Serpent with a woman’s face. The Serpent always had a woman’s face. It was God’s will. She paused, the brush poised above the tiny puddle of verdigris, thinking of a clear desert night, a deep black sky alive with stars, a jackal howling. 
 
In a deft movement, the hovering brush dipped instead into the oak gall ink, and the abbess gave the Serpent a neat black beard.
​

Jane Dougherty

Jane Dougherty lives and works in southwest France. Her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, The Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.

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Monster Hide-N-Seek
 
There are no monsters hunting me,
Not one for me to hear or see,
Though it’s said that they are there,
No monster limbs are in my hair.
 
I thought I heard a thump one night,
I pulled my covers snug and tight,
I closed my eyes and sang a song,
That sound alone should make them gone.
 
Maybe the monsters could be nice?
A friend once voiced her sage advice,
I rolled my eyes, patted her hand,
It’s sweet how she can’t understand.
 
The monsters do not smile or speak,
They do not hide for me to seek,
Their life is only as I breathe,
The monsters are inside of me.

Corrie Pappas

Corrie Pappas is a small business owner living outside of Boston. Her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review and she is the author of the children’s book, Come Along and Dream.

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The Colours of Night

I hear the children play
Stacking stones
All the seven ahead of ball
Breaking again-
I breathe the dead
Rising up a precipice
Walking past my body
Anchored in now.

From the rear car window
I watch myself
Sitting on a broken fence-
Hands drooping, one leg folded
The other unable to reach the ground.

Dark and hollow
Spread across the whole, half eaten
Like a wall with a peeling paint-
I will find the lost in numbers
Under the lighted lanterns,
As a child where I had envisioned
Tall bears hairy and brown
Paws up in the air.

The inner ghost splits
Lightning cuts up the sky
Thunder thrusts the eyes shut
That never meet another sunrise.

Abha Das Sarma

An engineer and management consultant by profession, Abha Das Sarma enjoys writing the most. Besides having a blog of over 200 poems (http://dassarmafamily.blogspot.com), her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru.

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Join us on Sunday afternoon for an ekphrastic writing session. Our small group creative writing playgrounds are about connection, community, and conversation, and you'll discover intriguing artworks and leave with ideas and drafts for poetry and small fictions.

Workshops are via Zoom, and cost $30 CAD or approx. $24 USD.

Click here or on image of angel for more information.
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