The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead

Ekphrastic Writing Responses: Rachel Ruysch

12/16/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge, by Rachel Ruysch (Netherlands) 1680s

Rachel of the Flowers
Rachel Ruysch, 1664-1750
 
You knew at a young age
your life would be 
surrounded  by your father's artifacts:
bones, bugs, stones in orderly disarray
his lab filling you with floral dreams
until you, the student, became the teacher
of light emerging from stone.
 
Profusion of peony reds with dark seeded centres
roses tumbling, waterfalls over pearl lustre
gems of silken leaves
 petals hovering before they fall.
 
You dreamed out  windows
contemplating light falling at dusk
others painting beneath you
worked while you 
out-mastered the masters of the day.
 
One, two, ten children later
still your hand drew 
emerging light from canvas
arranging, placing  
tumult of carnelian, ochre, azure
the green of the forest
where there was no forest, 
blushing convolvulas
that would not bloom again
until O'Keeffe dreamed.

Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes
 
Professor emerita of the English department from a campus of the University of Wisconsin System, also a retired librarian who served in a log cabin in the north woods of the state.  Poetry published in three countries and several languages including translation into Chinese; some recent work appears in Of Rust and Glass; Awakenings Project, Rosebud, Moss Piglet, Poetry Hall, The Ekphrastic Review, and forthcoming from the San Antonio Review.  Most recent chapbook is forthcoming from Cyberwit Press, When Wilding Returns.

**


To Rachel Ruysch Regarding Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge

Have here you painted somone else's art
who chose and cut each coloured stem to length
envisioning the sum as soul and heart
becoming briefly joy of beauty's strength...

...in which, though each indeed would stand alone,
all came to know, by master plan, embrace
as means with which, like finely chiseled stone,
they found by greater hand their time and place?

Or did you deep inside see ledge and urn
with this bouquet that speaks to living plight
as canvas where beholder could discern,
by slender ray of faintly echoed light,

the splendour and fragility of bloom
in dimly lit, forever waking room.

Portly Bard

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.

**


Her Secret Garden
 
In her dream,
her legs entwine a gorgeous floral bed:
she tumbles and tangles with poppies,
twists herself into the bluest of bindweeds
while her head turns on a pillow
strewn with more swathes of morning glory
and a peppering of wild
nasturtiums.
 
Her eyelids waver,
rising and falling as sun rays bleach the blinds
but her mind still lingers in strange meadows.
Though her hands grasp sheets, her fingertips trail
curls of leaves, stems, pollen
before she senses the stab of cacti, 
the snarl of thorns catching 
the nape of her neck.
 
She wakes, she stretches.
A chalk-blue butterfly alights
on a foxglove, grown tall and purpling
between her shoulder blades
that begin to itch. Her scratching 
shivers a hoverfly deeper into the petals
of an overblown rose that is rambling
across her back.
 
At last, she stirs,
standing to wash, slow breathe, dress.
Winged fritillaries flutter, shift, settle.
Balancing on a crinkled leaf,
a sleek dragonfly ripples
across her wrinkled skin
joining that flow of bright tattoos
swarming beneath her blouse.

Dorothy Burrows

Based in the United Kingdom, Dorothy Burrows enjoys writing poetry, flash fiction and short plays. Her poems have been published in both online and print journals, including The Ekphrastic Review. Roses, poppies, convolvulus and stone slabs can be found in her garden but she does not possess an urn.

**


Haiku

A scent
of coming death
Fated

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? (Kelsay Books July 2022) and WHISTLING IN THE DARK (Taj Mahal Publishing House July 2022), are both available on Amazon. Her seventh collection, SAUDADE, is going to be published by Kelsay before the year is out. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

**
​
Adventure Is a Bouquet
 
Snipped from a garden, roses breeze the room.
They live urned near a stone ledge. 
 
Adulthood is sledding the snow-sculpted hill 
in the park until bottom. The past acts 
 
like a ghost crawling from a fireplace no one cleaned.
What keeps returning is the strange navy glow 
 
of a Cub Scout shirt and shock of the first coat and tie 
laying on a bed to wear for grandfather’s funeral.  
 
The future is chained to the past—now ashes. 
Adulthood is not a fair exchange and one way 
 
of staying alive is to avoid a stone ledge
while sleeping with red poppies and to remember 
 
the soul looks like other souls walking a gaslit street.
Another way to rise above the topsoil is to stop 
 
counting the remaining days like morning glories, 
their tender seeds once buried in pots.
 
Today, the pharmacist is a goddess in her white jacket, 
eyes flowered dark. She inserts the needle.

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.

**

Next Thursday 
                                                                                          
Having spoken to you about this, I don't like it ! What satisfies me is this, expecting casual rules. After being content alone, we are together. This Thursday, Yes. Next Thursday, I will be there. "If she apologized to him, then he lied to me.”  I'm handling this, left handed, Oh right you are. She hated pepper and salt, they are no good for you. Why must you do that, the dog doesn't like it either. The cat licked his feet, he must be cold. You need to find a professional, not me. She was surprised at the wit, then fainted. The office closed, the dead line busy. It didn't open, while the garage door worked. The paper was late, conditions warranted change. Making a game of it, what is for dinner ? Statements made were false, but the heart was true. Sex is so over, not really ever existing for me. Yelling a lot, but never meaning much by it. Holding fast, the storm passed slowly. Snap-shots of life, frames that never stop shooting. A lesson learned disappeared, replaced by an iron. No pictures allowed, the past is naked. The bed collapsed, it wasn't anyone's fault.  A mouse ate some cheese, and is now fat. Do you really want to go to jail, that's illegal. The teacher left town to come back. It’s a win-win, do it your way. Check it off the list, The Park. We are all alike, but not on the same day. Remember those flowers, they were beautiful.

MWPiercy

MWPiercy is a writer and artist.

**

Thank You for the Flower Arrangement
 
Your extravaganza displays 
as how you love me. A red rose 
threatens to shed a petal, spreads
open almost lazy. Poppy nods.
Your card, yes I know you 
miss me, tucked into a drawer. 
I believe I miss you more. 
All lights off after this short day. 
Dark dims both reds and green. 
We don’t know, do we, 
when we’ll see each other
again. Weeks, maybe months,
so I’ll scatter spent blooms on
the stone-cold garden. I promise
to wash the vase, store it,
hold for what you deliver next. 

Tricia Knoll

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose husband lives 3,000 miles away. Her new book 
One Bent Twig (poetry about trees and climate change) is available from Future Cycle Press in January, 2023. 

**

Resisting Flowers from Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge, by Rachel Ruysch (Netherlands) 1680s


My feet are cemented in terracotta pots;
   I remained fixed inside
   during Spring’s sunny spectacles.
Summer adds its balmy lethargy.
Autumn chases me to the woodstove.
 
All unrestrained becoming, blossoming 
   and final blazing
is close.
   but I don’t 
   take my place
   in the cycle of beauty.
 
In this dark season,
   winter gardeners,
   rescuers,
     work to loosen the soil
     of potted people.
 
They sow life in the great indoors,
stoke my joy with nature’s designs.
 
Density of dark green tangle
pushes mightily at every angle,
heavy, veined with white strain
firm, full of recent rain
makes a vine backdrop, 
a vigor and volume black-drop 
to frame in contrasting bright
asymmetric, organic light:
 
Yellow lily, pink peach rose, orange gerbera daisy,
   bluebell, buttercup, begonia, royal blue convolvulus,
explode in irrepressible chaotic colour.
 
Lavender trumpets leap in spiral steps
prepare the pulpit for a towering orange proclamation:
Do not mourn for the dying of the season;
Do not believe the outdoors holds the only life and reason.
 
I shrink down to the size of one creature
and roam among the lovely growing things.

Sheila Murphy

Sheila Murphy writes poems to get closer to things. She is a musician, a pastoral minister, a spiritual director, cancer patient, retreat leader and adventurer. She has published poems in Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction and The Ekphrastic Review. Sheila lives in coastal Maine, is married and has two college-age children. 

**

Gasconade
 
With a slight nod and Mona Lisa smile 
rose announced herself the most beguiling 
bloom of the bouquet.
 
Chortling with a thorny voice
she stretched her long stem  
to the bottom of the urn
 and sucked as much water as she could, 
gulping with pleasure.
 
After shaking her shell-pink petals
 rose continued regaling her fellow flowers ,
telling them how she was named for Aphrodite’s son Eros.
It is said Aphrodite moved the letters around
and anointed the showy bloom--Rose. 
 
Rose could tell she was wearing on the 
watery poppies so she then 
declared herself the sexiest anagram of all time-
how with her canted neck and stem, 
she appeared wanton and would draw 
everyone’s gaze with wild abandon.
 
The other flowers ignored rose 
and smiled in their own beautiful way. 
They only kept her around 
for her scent which usually made up for 
her excessive boasting. 

Ursula McCabe 
 
Ursula McCabe lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work can be seen in Piker Press, The Avocet, Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers, Bluebird Word, and The Ekphrastic Review. 

**

Distilling life - Rachel Ruysch
 
So many blooming, bountiful years ahead
for this painter’s steady hand and inherited
eye for detail. Petals perfected, insects inspected, 
dutifully rendered with precise delicate touches. 
Her brush delivered milk thistle, a bold blue 
nasturtium, a blush pink rose, and a central peony
a glow to outlast mere fashion and taste. A tiny 
butterfly alights a foxglove, and below, ants climb, 
and a geometric spider approaches a white rose: 
danger and movement amid leaves and stems. 
But there’s darkness branching beyond
where the light falls. Cuttings freighted with paint. 
Awaiting appreciation, her life stills before 
the canvas, her hand then immortalises 
death-in-progress, flowers wilting to fade 
before the task of capturing them is complete, 
live on suspended in a moment. Nothing is left 
of the flowers, their vase, the insects, 
the buildings, or artist. Nothing left except this 
oil painting with fine cracks running through it, 
and the artist’s name. Both become a history-less 
record of inconsequential yet timeless 
ephemera rolling together like convolvulus 
across uncertain centuries without remark. 

Rebecca Dempsey 
 
Rebecca Dempsey’s recent work has featured in Streetcake Magazine, Defuncted, and Unstamatic. Rebecca lives in Melbourne / Naarm, Australia, loves art, writing and film, and can be found at WritingBec.com.

**

Baby Boy, Born at 34 Weeks

Your bloom is so great

and so small, you
weigh only four pounds

and seven ounces; my heart,
you burst

from my body, a blossom

still perfect. Every life
is a flower

plucked from ignorance;
we thrive

and wither through our seasons
in this earthen urn,

beautiful in our arrangement
of certain decay.

My son, flourish

bright and brave, for one day
you, too, will fade.

You are my only
heavenly blue morning

glory in this wilted world.

Heather Brown Barrett

Heather Brown Barrett is a poet in southeastern Virginia. She mothers her young son and contemplates life, the universe, and everything with her writer husband. Her poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, OyeDrum Magazine, AvantAppal(achia), Black Bough Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram @heatherbrownbarrett

**

Floriography, or the Poet Writes a Love Letter to a Botanist
 
Rose:
 
            Years ago, on a whim,
            I ordered a rose-flavored latte – it came
            all white and pink, foamy milk petals spread
            to the rim, and I remember, my mouth tasted of rose syrup
            for hours afterward. It was Valentine’s Day,
            and I didn’t know you yet – but later,
            the day we walked through the garden
            amongst the rose bushes, you told me that the chemical compound
            that gave roses their scent was actually named for them – rose
            oxide – and that it was detectable to humans
            at concentrations in air as low as five parts
            per billion. And with so much more than five parts
            blossoming around us, I thought about that latte,
            and how so much of our sense of taste
            is tangled up in smell, and how much smell is tangled up
            in memory – and then you smiled, and something bloomed in my throat
            because it was Valentine’s Day again,
            and I smiled back, because I could just taste that syrup 
            on my tongue.
 
Convolvulus:
 
            Before you, I preferred to call this one morning glory,
            or belle de jour – but these days, you have me appreciating
            the Latin name, meaning, to wrap around, to bind
            together, to interweave – instead of ribbons, I imagine hands
            fasted with flower stems, growing
            yellow-centered blossoms ringed with a spring sunrise,
            bright white streaking into blue – I imagine palms
            turning, and Convolvulus tricolour
            guiding our fingers into the right patterns,
            the right twists and gaps – teaching our fingers
            how to form the shapes
            they need
            to lace
            together.
 
Poppy:
 
            I’ve never been a very good sleeper. That night we camped
            in your trailer – do you remember? – you fell asleep
            smelling like a field,
            and I stayed awake with a cup of tea,
            thinking of Persephone. The poppy was created
            for her sake, you know – her mother wasn’t a good sleeper either,
            so Persephone made sure that wherever she walked,
            her favourite flower blossomed
            from her footsteps. The tea she cultivated from it
            gave her beloved mother restful sleep
            and sweet dreams – and in the summers,
            Persephone would send bouquets of them
            down the Styx, to give her beloved husband
            the same. And I remember – that night as you slept,
            and I drank my tea, I got to thinking that really,
            it was Persephone’s love
            that made the world go ‘round – not roses,
            but poppies.
 
Other flowers:
 
            Nasturtium for celebration, peony for prosperity,
            foxglove for confidence and pride – floriography should be
            its own language family, with as many dialects
            as we have tongues – but still,
            with as many species and tones and models as we have,
            it’s the semantics that get us – whatever we try to say,
            however we try to say it, we can only hope
            that someone understands.
 
Urn on a stone ledge:
 
            What I mean to say is, please understand, I really like you –
            What I mean to say is, It doesn’t feel like enough to just say that I really like you –
            What I mean to say is, I wish I could arrange words
             the way you arrange trees and taxa, or a florist arranges the petals
             in a bouquet –
             What I mean to say is, Flowers communicate with auxins and terpenoids
             and mycorrhizal networks, and compared
             to those little miracles, language just feels so clumsy –
             What I mean to say is, please understand,
             I never wanted a garden
             until I met you.

Kimberly Hall

Kimberly Hall (she/her) received her master’s degree in behavioral science from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Her poetry has appeared in online publications such as First Flight and Sappho’s Torque, as well as in several ekphrastic poetry anthologies. She still gets the idiomatic butterflies whenever anyone mentions that where she can hear it.

**

Flowers in an Urn

The flowers have been left unchanged,
thin line between forgotten and uncared for.
Yet In the privacy of that urn,
they whisper and nudge each other,
the pot too small, the ledge too high 
precariously perched, 
Yet spilling over,
Some sprightly, some drooping,
some morning glories 
some narcotic poppies,
some shocking roses 
others shying,
perfumes intermingling,
heads colliding,
too snug in that home 
like fetuses in a womb,
ephemeral 
about to be replaced 
about to be watered 
sprayed with freshness 
or wilted with 
weight of bearing the beauty 
of the world on their shoulder 
in the midst of tragedy.

Akshaya Pawaskar

Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor-poet hailing from Goa, India. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards,The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling, among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020 and was placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The falling in and the falling out (Alien Buddha press, 2021) and Cocktail of life (bookLeaf publishing, 2022).

**


Scientist 

An exacting chemist 
he believed in daffodils and God 
in that order
abhorred sentiment
paged the dictionary for pleasure
and talked it
so words like abhorred come naturally to me
when speaking of him
and words like “Confound it, boy!”
came naturally to him
when speaking of me

Cleaning out his house we found
the urn empty
still dusty
God only knows where
he dumped mom’s ashes
We know he loved her 
as we salvage jonquil survivors
from neglected gardens
to place in the dusty water
of mother’s urn

Joe Cottonwood

Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book of poetry is Random Saints.

​**

The Golden

The turning-point between afternoon and eve, when energy runs 
out and colours give in, reluctantly, hop-skip-jumping along still 
lifes where techniques tell you to remember what grows and what 
urns, and the pyramid pictures of a past, that never seems erasable, 
they grow into questions. Hence, when was the last time you were 
in love at all - and when did the stems stop to curve less wildly? 

The sun lights to golden on a dark backdrop, that cannot seem to stop, 
yet cannot seem to stay green no more either, the clearness, a clarity, 
no, it’s sharpness rather, that’s left with wound-up light-ness, made up, 
to show everyone how well one flowers, when left with light-footed 
torment, a small part of a tall world, a gold world, unreal maybe, for 
when the body has gone, the mind needs a cushion, the feet in the grass, 

while the white wine headache seems more pleasing, still, days are 
lost later. The plan for tomorrow is to hang all skirts on a rack and 
feel the only truth when with you or with them, hence, hold my hand 
in a carriage or make it to my legs, there, while you never drove, 
while a mutual friend said you made me a portrait, and now I can only 
think of how much this must have cost you. Flower monsters power 

monsters, and in the end sharp brushes need cleaning too, in a way, 
non-fiction jettisoned, as fiction-life makes it workable to survive, 
without big tears, or airy-fairy feelings. I don’t know why you sold 
the blue velvet chairs, the marine bed, but I would never have come 
so far alone, after you. And I just wanted to tell you how I enjoyed 
the golden. 

Kate Copeland

Kate Copeland started absorbing stories ever since a little lass. Her love for words led her to teaching & translating, her love for art & water to poetry…please find her pieces at The Ekphrastic Review (plus Podcast & translations), First Lit.Review-East, GrandLittleThings, The Metaworker, The Weekly/Five South, New Feathers, Poetry Barn. Her recent Insta reads: https://www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/  Over the years Kate has volunteered at various literary festivals and at Lisa Freedman’s Breathe-Read-Write workshops. She was born @ Rotterdam some 53 ages ago and adores housesitting @ the world.

**

Because of the flowers there's the wind

Vistas, stains, dreams of life,
bits like growing hair
to be arranged as a centerpiece - 
now I have made a canvas out of a barren landscape.
The body enters, afraid:
absurdly, I spilled her crudity over it.
I have cut the watercolour myself,
when she broke my fall with lightning,
to ease the white that lightning splashes.

Angelo Colella

Angelo 'NGE' Colella lives in Italy, where he writes poetry and prose in Italian and English, makes analog collages, asemic writings and DADA objects.

**

photographs
 
I have lost both my father and mother, yet it’s the attempted suicide of my mother that seeps into my work. about the time yellow forsythia blooms. grandmother Mariska bakes kalács with raisins, my favourite. memories of me as a young girl, tearing cellophane of the Easter rabbit. the red ribbons. sweet bread and chocolate, two very different stains. I thread these stories together, of pain and loss and childhood memories. the work encircles itself as our conversations about wild flowers, life and death become the seeds of my photographs.

Ilona Martonfi

Ilona Martonfi is a mother, an activist, an educator, literary curator, poet and an editor. Born in Budapest, Hungary, she has also lived in Austria and Germany. Martonfi writes in seven chapbooks, journals across North America and abroad. Curator of the Argo Bookshop Reading Series. Recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2010 Community Award. Martonfi lives in Montreal, Canada. The Tempest, Inanna Publications, Spring 2022, is her fifth poetry book.

**


Rustic Rose 
 
This is an illuminated folio  
from the inherent old testament of the flower – 
when the bee ruled the breeding spree, 
before the advent of man’s hybridization campaigns. 
 
The queen of bloom – 
incarnation of ultimate attar,  
epitome of beauty, symbol of love, 
was one of the first to be welcomed aboard.  
 
And the crossbreeding delivered  
designer trendy points:  
glossier look, harder petal, grander format,  
and – a scientific surprise –  
less fragrance, if at all.   
The invisible, the magic of attar, was gone. 
What to hail, what to mourn, 
given that the symbol affects the beholder,  
then we are faced with a shocking importer –  
love without magical hues,  
practically - of no use. 
 
O, rustic rose, you are looking at us  
from this hues’ team-building exercise 
with wide open child eyes  
as a direct objection  
to the adults’ extreme demands  
from the ever young essence of nature;  
your humble stare is at once fragile and firm – 
davidian spark vs. goliathic gloom, 
brush and nature working hand in hand  
to intercept any existential torment: 
you knew – losing your fragrance meant  
losing your language,  
and not just any, but the lingua franca  
of the horticultural world.  
Essential threat.  
 
Any linguist’s fret.  
I joined the inquest by experiment –  
I made a bouquet in your image, 
set it in a matching dark vase, 
and studied it without bias. 
 
Here the results:  
in breach of the 17th century tick impasto   
your fragrant speech leaked and soared         
and overwhelmed the thin whim of the bouquet  
at a coat of paint distance from me.  
 
Hence, the conclusion:  
the roses I bought at the hip flower market 
for their elegant sculpted  headgears,  
expressed no attar utterance, towered mute, 
‘cause they were engineered;  
while your inborn artless beam storied 
the essence of the honeyed conception 
‘cause it used nature’s power of creation. 
   
As a footnote:  
this little horticultural episode  
speaks not just for the blossom queen, 
but for all endangered languages   
of anything that blooms – 
plant, smile, idea, spring –  
flourishing on earth as it is in the genesis, 
and in this colorfully unassuming emphasis.       
 
Ekaterina Dukas 
 
Ekaterina Dukas has studied and taught linguistics and culture at Universities of Sofia, Delhi and London and authored a book on medieval art for the British Library.  She writes poetry as a pilgrimage to the meaning and her poems featured numerous times in The Ekphrastic Review, Ekphrastic Challenges, Poetrywivenhoe and others.  Her collection Ekphrasticon is published by Europe Edizioni, 2021.

**

Now you have left me
 
You gave me these blooms, 
but—see--
they droop now.
 
Painted in hues of light, bellbine
bound me to you…yet
descends now into dusk.
 
That peony, token of my bashfulness
(you knew me far too well),
now shows only brokenness.
 
Were the poppies meant, perhaps, 
to comfort me? If so, they hang 
their heads in scarlet shame.
 
Those pure white rose-petals flare 
as sign of innocence lost; you chose red, 
red roses to tell silken lies of love.
 
One flower alone
speaks thorny truth--
of all your treachery:
 
the crimson rose 
for heart-deep mourning
now you have left me lone and lorn.
 
Lizzie Ballagher

Never having had a collection of her landscape poetry published, Ballagher is currently working on a sequence of poems about Exmoor (UK). Recently one of these was chosen as winner in Poetry on the Lake's 2022 formal category with a pantoum about Tarr Steps in mid-Exmoor: https://www.poetryonthelake.org/competition

**

Fragrance

Muriel gathered all the artificial blossoms, the stray plastic flowers that were scattered around the cemetery after storms, took them home and stuck them in a dark squat vase she'd found in a charity shop. A shrine of sorts to her own displaced life.  It sat in a dingy unloved corner of her ugly room, providing a bright spot of unnatural eternal floral freshness, gaudily cheerful.  No matter how many times she sniffed the bouquet it remained unscented.  Still she persevered, convinced there would be a sweet fragrance to be inhaled, one that would transport her to other times, other places.  Later, when they came to clear the rented room, the woman who picked up the vase and its contents paused and briefly looked at its dust encrusted edges before it too went into a large black bin liner along with Muriel's other meagre possessions.

Emily Tee

Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction.  She's had pieces published online in The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere and in print in some publications by Dreich, as well as several poetry anthologies. She lives in England.

**


Fragile Dancers

we cannot see the hands that clutch the stems
nor the heads bowed in weariness
only the multi-hued skirts are draped
from carefully arranged branches
dancers' feet tucked up inside them
shy stamens and pistils dwarfed
by shades of red and white
with one lone cerulean blue
representing the prima donna
who now sits overwhelmed
by the chorus

Adrienne Stevenson


Adrienne Stevenson (she/her) lives in Ottawa, Ontario. A retired forensic scientist and Pushcart-nominated poet, she writes in many genres. Her poetry has appeared in more than forty print and online journals and anthologies in Canada, the USA, the UK, and Australia. When not writing, Adrienne tends a large garden, reads voraciously, and procrastinates playing several musical instruments.

**


Where Sits the Urn

Whooshing midnight train mounts
Bird cries where sits the urn-
Holding glory in white and pink,
Convolvulus falling, softly
Like a thin warm rain
By the stone ledge where sits the urn.

Wishes in poppy colour outshining life,
Fragrances unfurling
In rose petals filling the urn-
The untimely return of moments,
Deception, overflowing of ashes
Into shape of a day yet to come.

Each hour increasing the emptiness,
Sky looping inside the moon-
Endless
On the bedside windowsill
Where stood the urn once.

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, Silver Birch Press, Blue Heron Review, here and elsewhere. Having spent her growing up years in small towns of northern India, she currently lives in Bengaluru.


0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Current Prompt

    Challenges
    ​

    Here is where you will find news for  challenges, contests, and special events.

    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture

    Archives

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021

    Lorette C. Luzajic [email protected] 

  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead