Tarsila do Amaral: Ekphrastic Writing Responses

Carnival in Madureira, by Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil) 1924

To Tarsila do Amaral Regarding Carnival in Madureira

You paint your nation into art
as samba steeped in festive heart,
the equal of Parisian fete
to herald spring and celebrate

the love that mimics river sway
--  as mime, as music, as ballet  --
but here to ocean's harsher beat
of ripple, roar, and brief retreat

you rightly colour crisply drawn
a past that must embrace a dawn
more modern than its yesteryear
as faithful gather to revere,

in hues  --  befitting soul  --  so bright,
the coming sombre wait for Light.

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.

**

The Great Carnival
 
The great carnival.
People coming together.
In celebration.
 
Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher
 
Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher has been writing since 2010 and has had short stories, micro-flash fiction, and haiku poetry published. She currently resides on Long Island, New York with her husband Richard and adorable Shih-Tzus Breanna and Maximus. 

**

​A Moment of Joy Held Still
 
My lips began to turn up 
to form a smile as soon as
my eyes caught hold of this image.
Squared off lines, shapes mostly 
piled on top of one another people
stopped in the midst of walking
talking, laughing as if someone
had called out “Stop the Action!”
Even the wind listened—halting 
the flag in mid-wave on the tower.
It’s all as it was the night I lived it;
as it still is when I relive it in my dreams.
The night I went to such a festival
the Ferris wheel stopped with me 
at the top and I, at age five
looked down at the scene below,
wondering if I should count this 
as fun or cry out in fear?
Looking down, that crowd
far below, seemed to be stopped 
too, caught in mid-movement.
Their laughter and lightness
floated up to me.
They were halted yet still happy.
My fear melted away, and I chose to
celebrate my situation, as a moment
that put me on top of the world,
a moment of joy.
When my memory rolls back to
that moment, whether when I’m awake
or when it finds its way into a dream, 
the scene is captured as a tableaux
by my consciousness, as still as
as a photo or painting --
all action halted, but full of life
full of joy.

Joan Leotta

Joan Leotta offers encouraging words through pen and performance. Her essays, poems, and fiction have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of Net multiple times, has won several awards, and has published five poetry books with three different poetry publishers. Her storytelling work includes folklore and personal tales told for youth and adult audiences and the presentation of one-person shows, the most recent being Louisa May Alcott, Writer, Nurse, Activist.

**

​feathers of a different flock

the procession wears colours
as loud as 
the drums 
the bass 
the shouting vendors
construction works on the square
 
we dance to drilling
hips swinging
necks craning
 
even the houses stretch their arms
capturing bells and ringing light
 
there is so much sound 
even the hills and stones are rolling
 
we cannot stop our legs
drunken as dervishes we keep spinning
 
I wish to plunge into a cold stream

Eva Lantsoght

Eva Lantsoght is a multilingual poet from Belgium, who lives in the Netherlands and Ecuador. Her work has appeared in Katern, Museum de Mindere, De Optimist, Spillwords, Hesiodos Flow Fest, has been awarded with the Soetendaele poetry prize and Harelbeke poetry prize, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.

**

​Na Boca do Povo

Ai, Senhora! You are on 
everyone’s lips, the talk 
of the town, as your hips sway, 
feet step forward and back, 
then crisscross along the street 
in the botafogo samba strut. 

Shoulders out, belly in. 
Dance, Mamãe, dance!

That dress in Baía de Guanabara blue, 
how it hugs your curves! That headscarf 
red hibiscus bloom, your skin rich coffee, 
you move through Madureira’s steamy heat 
to the music of vendors calling, “Fale comigo, 
minha rainha! Talk to me, my queen!” 

You stroll to the squawks and squeals 
of the mercadão’s ducks, goats, and pigeons. 
Breathe in spicy mint, rosemary, basil, and leeks. 
Avoid the revelers who weave with aguardente. 
Treat yourself to the sweet coconut treat of quindim.

Ai, Senhora! The noisy train still clatters and screeches 
as it passes through the bairro. Just more music for you 
to sway your hips, move your feet, throw back your head, 
and celebrate the raucous, unfettered joy that is 

Carnaval em Madureira!

Jennifer Hernandez 

Jennifer Hernandez teaches immigrant youth and writes poetry, flash, and creative non-fiction. Her words can be found in public installations, literary journals, and spoken into the air. Recent homes for her work include Silver Birch Press, Talking Stick, Agates, and the Detroit Lakes Flowerpot Poetry Walk. Pushcart-nominated, Jennifer has newly transitioned into the role of president of the League of Minnesota Poets and believes that through the power of language we can change the world.

**

The Infinite Porch

No one lives here
declared the incidental passing
by B-1439, our ancestral home.

A carnival erupted
as we crossed the threshold.
Bells chimed so long locked
in stiff silence
of now swaying curtains.
The walls breathed,
empty spaces filled with the
rising scent of samosas and jalebis.

Voices buzzed as we crowded
around the table laid with
dal, chawal, sabji, roti.
Celebrations followed with
heirloom rampage-
a life-sized box full of quilts
stinging air thick with naphthalene.
Dried-up bottles of perfume,
evaporated nail polishes and
a hexagon box of bangles
locked shut by rust.
Hangers sagging in silk
stripped of their youth.

It had rained the night,
the wet grass glistened in the sun-
tented poles yielded
to an unwilling recline,
a low murmur stirred the air.

On a vacant porch
where time had felt infinite
before.

Abha Das Sarma

Abha Das Sarma lives in Bangalore, India. An engineer and management consultant by profession, writing is what makes her happy and fulfilled. Her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Spillwords, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Sparks of Calliope, Trouvaille Review, Blue Heron Review, Poetry X Hunger, here and elsewhere.

**

Stranger in  Madureira

Sparklers sizzle with light
under the moon's piñata
split in half, spilling a thousand stars,

women in bright skirts
burst like fireworks in the air
pop dancing to Samba, 

while  a tourist watches
fanned by the green plumage
of  palm trees. The ocean's breath
clean and clinging to her body
that still remembers a lost love.  

Pleated in pale linen
with her hair drawn back, a bun
the breeze unravels, she feels
the fraying strands, the chords
of  her common  song

unstrung, out of  tune. Her shadow
stretches toward the street

catching the drift of  red petals
bleeding into their own sense of  saudade

and  the scent of  hot
cheesy bread. Pão de Queijo
invoking her whim
to abandon  flesh  and become
spirited as the gust
of  revelers  whirling  round
the corners of  carnaval, the iron spine

of  its  Eiffel Tower.   

Wendy Howe

Wendy Howe is an English teacher and free lance writer who lives in Southern California. Her work is deeply influenced by diverse cultures, history, myth and women's issues.  Over the years, she has appeared in a number of  journals including:  Liminality,  Silver Blade, Eye To The Telescope, Strange Horizons, Mirror Dance,  Carmina Magazine, The Copperfield Review, Eternal Haunted Summer and Sage Woman. Her most recent work has appeared in The Otherworld Magazine and  Indelible Magazine.  

**

Letter To My Sister, Cecilia do Amaral 
5 March, 1925

Minha Amada Irmã,

Some would call me silly and ridiculous to write to my beloved sister that passed away some fifteen years ago.

But you, Cecilia, you would not be one of them. And so, I write to you, knowing you are somewhere above me, looking down, and sometimes sending me the most extraordinary butterflies! Our favourite, the blue Caligo Beltrao, which many claim to have  never seen, gather around me in twos and threes, even when I’m far from our countryside hacienda! I know they are messages from you, sweet one, and although I often have “talked” to you aloud, now I’m writing, so whether this makes me crazier or more sane,  here we are.

In my heart, I believe you will read this.

So many things have happened since our idyllic time at Colegio del sagrado corazon! The worst of which was, of course, losing you before your 23rd birthday. I think the best times of my life so far were spent with you in Barcelona, in the excellent boarding school we were privileged to attend. While other girls cried themselves to sleep at night, we whispered in a single bed, until one of us began to fight sleep, not making sense except to one another! Such a marvellous thing, to be sent away to school with you, no mamae nor papai  to query us, no governess or overseer to interrupt our endless games, no bratty brothers trying to get between us, screaming loudly, trying to scare us apart!

I recall helping you with your French homework at school, and pulling out ‘en croissant’ from lunch, wrapped in a napkin, from my pocket!

How surprised you were to see it, complete with a tin of raspberry jam! I loved sharing that special time with you, little sister. 

Now my life is filled with so many bright colours, yet your butterflies remain the most special colour I’m blessed to spy! Oswald and I attended the Carnival Madureia last month, and the entire promenade was awash in bursts of bright colors. It reminded me so much of our childhood in the countryside! How spoiled we were, to be surrounded by huge swaths of the greenest green grass, the river water tinted cerulean in summer, the gigantic orange sun dipping down to impress us in the early evening. 

Not to mention the kaleidoscope of butterflies, as many colours as we could dream up, right before our wide-open eyes! 

These are the colours I used in my latest painting, named for the carnival. The style is a mixture of the techniques I learned in Paris with the master, Georg Elpaus, and a new, rather comical, square method for portraiture, called "Cubism."  For all I know, you have already previewed my efforts, but if not, you will (Hopefully soon!) be able to peek in on an art expedition in our city. It will be staged with some of my other friends, including Oswald, who may be my future husband! He has been requesting tiny illustrations from me for his poetry books, and we work very well together. I feel he will ask for my hand very soon! 

A troublesome conflict has been brewing in the streets of Sao Paulo recently. The people are not happy with the government, and little uprisings are starting to explode all over our homeland! If the military takes control, I fear things will get even worse than they are now.

When I last saw Papai, he was, as always, focused on the coffee! The coffee, the terroir, the price, the size of the crop. He fusses about these concerns, while mamae furrows her brow over every exploit of our brothers, and worries about not only our family, but all of the workers, and the entire population of Brasil!

Selfishly, I focus on my lover and my art. I have been contributing to “Klaxon,” an avant-garde magazine started by Oswald, that promotes our little “Group of Five,” my closest artistic confidants. Of course, I am concerned about the prospect of war. But my art reigns supreme to me, and has done so ever since you dared me to draw the chalky statue of the Madonna that stood outside our school. Since then, my love, I have been locked-in, wanting so desperately to be known as “The painter of my country!” Yes, me, a mere woman, telling the story of Brasil, through my color-soaked brushstrokes! It is my fondest wish, Minha! Are there any strings you can pull up there? Please ask that I become even more inspired, enough to make it all come true!

Te Amo,
Your Irma mais veha,
Tarsila

P.S. Promise to send one tiny caligo beltrano to me soon. I will take it as a certain sign you have read this!

Debbie Walker-Lass

Debbie Walker-Lass, (she/her) is a poet, collage artist, and writer living in Decatur, Georgia. Her work has appeared in Collaborature, The Rockvale Review, Green Ink Poetry, The Ekphrastic Journal, Punk Monk, Poetry Quarterly, The Light Ekphrastic and The Niagara Poetry Journal, among others. Debbie was proud to be nominated by TER for the Best Small Fictions, 2024 anthology. Debbie is an avid Tybee Island beachcomber and lover of all things nature. She also enjoys writing with Jahzara Wood, they write collaborative poetry as “The 1965.”  Debbie is an avid Tybee Island beachcomber and lover of all things nature.

**

​Carnival Season
 
The Carnival captures lightness of being
in a daylight offering of confetti painting
 
in a ritual to honour the sun. O, I, the toad 
princess, with body compressed
 
to the ground, seek this lightness--
the exact feeling of entering a book
 
for coloring flat shapes not 
weighted by dimensions of volume. 
 
Purity reigns in positioning
green mounds in the background,
 
while flags wave messages in semaphore
poetry: red of passion, white of innocence
 
and tangerine of blessedness. 
These hues shape a quilt of things valued 
 
by the Carnival People, the ones waiting
for the lift to the top of the tower 
 
as children wade in a pool of water to cool their 
feet in the round surround of fecundity. 
 
One woman stretches to happiness. 
Others proud-hatted and dressed with dignity. 
 
Milton Avery would witness nothing less
than frivolity at the fairground of fantasy. 
 
Cynthia Dorfman

Cynthia Dorfman writes from Maryland and Wisconsin, depending on the season. Her current work focuses on the small town in North Country New York where she grew up. She'll visit the town on the edge of the Adirondack Mountains this summer. She seeks to keep her memories bright.

**

​Train Ride to Madureira

The colors of Brazil slide by the train window--- green and yellow
leaves elongated like arms reaching over the train top as it chugs 
through the rain forests on its way to Rio and the festival in Madureira,
to see true the centerpiece of the vibrant carnival celebration;
 a recreation of the Eiffel Tower done in majestic Pau Brazil fashion. 

The train moves through jungles and villages and becomes the agent that
grants the pride of native Brazil, and commits the colours, and people of the 
interior to  Tarsila do Amaral's art. Brazil for Brazil! 

And at a stop thick with humidity a young man named Villa-Lobos
enters the train. And the sounds of clacking and the train whistle
as it moves through the countryside settle like colourful jungle birds
on his sheet music notation. With colour and sound the train brings
the art and music of Brazil to the outside world.

The little train
in travel and destination
the true wonder of Brazil!

Daniel Warren Brown

Daniel Warren Brown is a retired special education teacher who began writing poetry as a senior. At age 72 he published his first collection, an exploration of family titled Family Portraits in Verse, and Other Illustrated Poems.  Daniel has been published in various journals and anthologies, most recently Jerry Jazz Musician, Chronogram Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review  and Kinds of Cool, an anthology of jazz poetry.. He was included in Arts Mid-Hudson's  Poets Respond To Art in 2022-23. Daniel writes each day about music, art and whatever else captures his imagination.

**

… it’s the way a carnival makes everyone feel … 
 
good! What a start--
they have their own Eiffel Tower brought back
from Paris with love in the joy of the paint returned
a replica like so many others around the world
this one with the funkier look of an artist’s style
with bold outlines to make it stand out proud
of the colourful surrounds
it’s a motif to celebration of a sort
a totem to creation in the capital bounds
home to festivals and carnivals
parades of music dance to Afri-Brazilian tradition
and the curious sports of flag dressing and balloon hanging
performed by all ages ranging from childhood to os avós
with folks of all shapes and sizes
in a kaleidoscope of rainbow bright
Red Indigo Orange are its primed capital hues
a mixed palette of house walls and gaily painted roofs
standing before the foothills and rock formed
mushrooming in shape tipping beneath the sky blue
where the revellers hold their fashion parade
under Eiffel’s stride and crisscross girders
filled with their pride and awesomeness
they’re upbeat and joyous for the life they create
revelling in the sunny disposition 
and the good atmosphere they generate

Peter Longden

Peter Longden, born in 1957 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, lives in Coventry, England with Sally and son, Joe. After retiring from a long career in youth work, Peter has had a dozen poems published, by The Ekphrastic Review, Wee Sparrow Press; an anthology called Yesterday's Diary, published during lockdown in Coventry. Peter was also was shortlisted for the 9th O’Bheal Five Words International Competition (2022). Eldest son Ben, Estefi and grandaughter Gigi live in Argentina.​

**

​Carnivaliant

There's an awful lot of toffee in Brazil;
We've so much ginger bread we built a tower
(An Eiffel Tower) where you can climb your fill:
A cupcake will be lowered on the hour.
The houses glow like candy in a store:
I'm standing like a teapot, dressed to kill;
Come, join the feast - what are you waiting for?
There's an awful lot of toffee in Brazil.
 
The flags are turning like a crazy mill;
The local hill is friendly as a cloud;
You can bring dogs or donkeys, if you will;
They won't be heard, the colours are so loud.
Preserve this in your memory: mad caps,
Houses that smile, sweet as a three-buck bill;
Could there be sticky moments?  Well, perhaps;
There's an awful lot of toffee in Brazil!

Ruth S Baker

Ruth S Baker has published in some online poetry journals. She has a special love for animals and visual art.

**

​The Year I Could Not Go to the Carnival

I lay with swollen, mumped cheeks on the playroom sofa. I tried to distract myself with comic books and cartoons, but the year I could not go to the carnival, I thought of the goldfish I would not bring home in its plastic bag aquarium when I didn’t land a ping-pong ball in a bowl to win it. The year I could not go to the carnival, my hands remained clean and not sticky from pink cotton candy. I could not feel the crystallization of fluffy puffs to pure sugar in my mouth. The year I could not go to the carnival, I could not get motion sickness on the merry-go-round or crack-the-whip, could not purchase a raffle ticket, I could not get overheated while waiting my turn for a pony ride. The year I could not go to the carnival, I put my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear my sisters and the other kids on the block gush about their prizes. The year I couldn’t go to the carnival, I vowed to save my money and spend it all at next year’s carnival.

Barbara Krasner

​Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based author and poet who successfully recovered from the mumps and measles. Her most recent books include The Color of Time and Other Stories (Blaze/VOX, 2025), The Night Watch: Poems (Kelsay Books, 2025), and The Wanderers: Poems (Shanti Arts, 2026). She’s co-editor of Kelsey Review, the literary journal of Mercer County (NJ) Community College. www.barbarakrasner.com.
​
**