George Seurat’s Evening at Honfleur
 
Seurat’s science calls horizontals calm,
but down the slope of pilings these turn sad,
while sunset breaks white against the solemn
black of jagged rock. His light’s a stern, mad
 
landscape divided into tiny balls.
This picture’s machine calculates why
one pale dot hued against the next recalls
a cool gaiety not unlike the sky
 
spread out above a certain slant of shore.
Somehow we understand this riddled air
and suspend it in thought above Honfleur
because Seurat saw something like it there.
 
His art’s divisioned dots define a scheme,
conceived as theory, that we must see as dream.

Joseph Stanton

This poem was first published in Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, by Joseph Stanton, Time Being Books, 1999.

Read The Ekphrastic Review's interview with Joseph Stanton, here.

Joseph Stanton is Professor Emeritus of Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has published six books of poems: Moving Pictures, Things Seen, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban Oahu, Cardinal Points, and What the Kite Thinks: A Linked Poem (co-authored with Makoto Ooka, Wing Tek Lum, and Jean Toyama). Over 500 of his poems have appeared previously in The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, New Letters, Poetry East, Ekphrasis, Image, Antioch Review, Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, and many others. His awards include the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award, the Ekphrasis Prize, the James Vaughan Poetry Award, the Ka Palapala Pookela Award for Excellence in Literature, and the Cades Award for Literature. 

The Werther Effect
                                                                                    
Roaming around the musty stacks
at the George Bruce Branch of the
New York Public Library – a 12 year-old
and artless me, eager though indiscriminate
traveler – my only real move being
from Children’s Section to Adult –
I somehow landed on The Sorrows
of Young Werther.
 
Before I even knew what Sturm und Drang was,
Goethe tossed me this way, and then that:
young Werther hopelessly in love with Charlotte,
who is affianced to Albert, whose pistols Werther
borrows (so right in an epistolary novel!),
as he sets off upon a journey, shoots himself,
and then is buried under a linden tree. Poor Charlotte’s
grief, of course, immense; perhaps she too will soon
find solace under that selfsame tree.
 
Not knowing fully what this all might mean,
(having just moved to the Adult Section),
I did know it was bad – a puddle
of impossible desires. And so I put my head down
(not quite in Walheim, but at 125th in Harlem,
at the George Bruce Branch), and quietly wept.
 
I always wondered what had caused my yielding,                                                                
so complete, to the pathos of poor Werther:           
Was it the tatters of another day spent reeling     
in that 6th grade maelstrom? Was it the afternoon’s
receding light in that already dim library? Or was it
just the sudden gush of a pre-adolescent geyser?
What?
 
It was only decades later that I came across
the curious phenomenon of Werther Fever:
1774, the novel published. . . countless young men
dressed in yellow trousers, blue waistcoats, and long black
boots – all over Europe, Werther mushroomed. . .
drawings, cups, plates, even a perfume – celebrating
woe.
Too often were their bodies found, the tearful
book beside them.
         Banned in Leipzig, banned in Italy,
banned in Denmark; the clothes, the book – contagious.
Reportedly two thousand young men taken by his sorrows:
the Werther Effect.

Then traveling further, I alighted on a Wilhelm
Amberg painting, from 1870. Five young girls
sitting in a tawny forest. One, in a long dark dress,
reads to the others, and on the rock behind her
rests a handkerchief. A second girl weeps
quietly on a companion’s shoulder. Another,
rapt and sorrowful . . . 

                                          Listening, they wear
a look of wondering sadness,
a look the newly blossomed wear.
.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .    . 
A golden light seeps through the trees;
late afternoon – a turning time. The painting
titled “Reading from Goethe’s Werther.”
 
The scene a frame in which to set my own tears
shed for Werther’s troubles – now mirrored here,
quintuply-mirrored, in my melancholy doubles.
 
No longer I, just one disquieted young reader,
but rediscovered finally unto myself – collected –
part of a universal chorus now of grievers!

Helen Bournas-Ney

Helen Bournas-Ney was born on the island of Ikaria, Greece, and grew up in NYC. She served as the Assistant Director of the GED Center at NYU and as the Director of the Learning Center at SUNY Farmingdale, and also taught a number of writing courses. She received the Anaïs Nin Award for her work on Rimbaud and George Seferis. Her work has appeared in Plume, the Cumberland Poetry Review, the New Hampshire College Journal, and the 2019 anthology Plume Poetry 7.

​Ophelia
 
No one else had ever told her that.
 
Only the shining wasp with a voice clean
as a spinning needle--
how water would hold her closer
than any body. Never betray her.
It would polish her bones like fever.
 
This is why she pushed her way through
cattails which sprang
like a crown of thorns along the riverbed,
her red slippers going burgundy
in the bloodwarm, tidal mud.
 
The water’s green meniscus wavered
in the swell of her advance. Abandoned,
her bouquet spread across the surface
like frail arms opening toward the perfect
cerulean sky. Her pale braids unspooled
 
like scrims of light. The spoiled lace
of her gown, yellowed with pollen
and sun, tangled in a willow branch torn
free in the past night’s storm, and
for a single breathless moment held
 
her in the shadow of that ancient tree
while, just above her watery eyes,
the black wasp hung, unfurling paper
from its mouth like a delicate scroll
upon which nothing was written.
 
Or else it was something unbearable as grief.
 
Frank Paino

This poem previously appeared in The Journal and Out of Eden.

Frank Paino was born in Cleveland, Ohio and earned an MFA from Vermont College. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including: Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran, North American Review, World Literature Today, The Briar Cliff Review, Lake Effect and the anthology, The Face of Poetry.  His third book, Obscura, is forthcoming from Orison Books in 2020.  Frank’s first two volumes of poetry were published by Cleveland State University Press: The Rapture of the Matter   (1991) and Out of Eden (1997).  His awards include a Pushcart Prize, The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and a 2016 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

Cloud Gate
Millennium Park, Chicago
 
Silver archway, upturned u. Watch the specks of colour
as you walk toward it. One of them is you.
Seek the hue of your t-shirt, a splash of handbag.
 
There you are, high in a corner, near sky.
And though close now, you’re small as though viewed
through the narrow end of field glasses.
 
Come underneath. Crane your neck to see a face 
you’ve known since birth peering down, shining
and safe like a waking dream of your afterlife.
 
Stroll until nightfall. Bowed skyline lit and reflected,
the Bean glitters like Lake Michigan in the dark. Only here,
you can touch the cool surface with no risk of falling in.

Ona Gritz

Ona Gritz's poetry collection Geode was a finalist for the 2013 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Catamaran Literary Reader, Bellevue Literary Review, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. Ona is also an essayist, memoirist and children's author.

Reader and contributor Lindsay Shen proudly wears her heart on her sleeve!

​Read her poetry here.

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