Please join us at The Ekphrastic Review next week on Zoom for an evening of wine, art, and writing with Tarot inspirations! Did you know that the tarot was originally a card game? It came into use as an esoteric tool along the way and today is popularly used as a therapeutic tool because of the variety of symbols and archetypes. We will use it as a tool for creativity, doing some fun and meaningful exercises in a generative writing session. Come and write with us. Bring your own Merlot, or a pot of tea as we get cozy and banish the winter blues in community and creativity.

Also coming up: The Pre-Raphaelites, The Erotic Muse, and Leonora Carrington
https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrasticwritingworkshops.html
​

Winter Light
  
Even Sunday, the city is a frenzy. All scowl and growl, eyes cast low. January’s slush and freeze fresh, slick and slippery. The banshee winds spooking shrill through skyrise corridors. Still, you are standing. Still here to count the day a blessing. This time last year, it was possible, likely even, that you would die.
 
Still fragile, you watch carefully for ice patches in the parking lot of St. Seraphim of Sarov Orthodox cathedral. The church is half empty but your heart is full of mystery as prayer fills the room. The Christmas trees and poinsettia remind you of the reason.  On every wall, icon paintings of saints and intricate vines, dusty pinks and rusty reds. Ancient symbols and acronyms like ciphers. A cloud of warm frankincense. The rites here are as indecipherable to you as the Cyrillic on vellum, an unfamiliar choreography.
 
It is the dancing light from bouquets of beeswax candles, slender stalks bundled at either side of the altar. It is magical how it flickers against the gold leaf of Mary’s halo:   Theotokos, and the elaborate inlaid gold framing the icons that are doors between the narthex and the nave.  There was a time when you were outraged by such ornaments, when some people went hungry. But today you think about the woman washing Christ’s feet with rare perfumes. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me.  Gold is a gift, like life, and beauty is profound and rare. A taste of heaven. In this space, it belongs to everyone. The whole city can step inside to pray and partake of it. This gift of life.
 
You do not know these traditions, how gold symbolizes purity, the unperishable, the precious, or that it reflects the eternal light, but you feel something about it in its glow. The lowly manger,  the splendor of glory, two different aspects of the same winter light.
 
The Divine Liturgy: men in white and gold cloaks and crosses, with candle sticks, dikirion and trikirion, glowing the unwaning light of God. Their ecstatic, mournful incantations meld with myrrh and balsam, rich and sweet as angels in the honeyed air.

Lorette C. Luzajic

This first appeared in Heart of Flesh.

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, editor, and visual artist in Toronto, Canada.

House vs. Home                    
 
Bright among pines, dark
bark, full backdrop
 
of heart-high fields,
the surreal uncurls a wild
 
secret, opens its bird-sized
entrance to call you
 
to the shadowed insides
of the blue tin house
 
where not once
have swallows emerged
 
above each precisely
crafted rose—one fuchsia,
 
one salmon—their metal
petals peeking out
 
in fern-filtered daylight
to lush woods that’s aren’t
 
actually there, everything real
and green sprouting only
 
from the verdant trails of mind
you’re just beginning to travel
 
beyond your kitsch-decorated 
garden and manicured lawn

where even painted pink 
flamingos parade themselves 

beyond suburbia and into
the allure of woods.

Marjorie Maddox

This poem and image is forthcoming in Small Earthly Space (Shanti Arts).

Marjorie Maddox has 16 collections of poetry—including How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks,  Seeing Things, as well as the ekphrastic collaborations Small Earthly Space and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (both with Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (with daughter Anna Lee Hafer www.hafer.work, a 2023 Dragonfly Book Award in photography/fine arts and American Fiction Winner Award in poetry) and others. She's also published a story collection, 4 children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and forthcoming Keystone Poetry (co-editor with Jerry Wemple). Assistant editor of Presence, shehosts Poetry Moment for WPSU. www.marjoriemaddox.com
 
After teaching college for 40 years, Dr. Karen Elias is an artist/activist, using photography to record the beauty and fragility of the world and to raise awareness about climate change. Her work is in private collections, has been exhibited in galleries, and has won numerous awards. She is a board member of the Clinton County PA Arts Council and curates the annual juried photography exhibit. In addition to Heart Speaks…, her collaborations have appeared in many journals, including Valiant Scribe and About Place. Her plays have been chosen by the Climate Change Theatre Action and performed in 8 countries.

The Room on the Courtyard 

Room, Courtyard 

Windows open on a courtyard, 
the room's one source of light. 
A window in the facing wall 
frames another dusky room, 
the glaze of a hung picture.
 
The light on that courtyard wall: 
you could search, as I have, 
among whorled tints of 
dahlias, roses, but never find 
an answering shade of gold. 

Look to the art of Byzantium,
perhaps? – an icon of, say, 
Madonna and Child, 
calmingly present within 
a timeless radiance. 

Gold, a way for light to live 
in sacred darkness. 
                             Now, here, 
wearing this hour's fresh sunlight, 
ancient light enters, bestows 
an everyday transcendence. 

A Woman Sewing 

That living gold points up 
a woman in silhouette, 
a net curtain embroidering 
the window's pure gaze, and –  
muse on a wicker throne – her cat.

The woman – who might be 
the artist herself or countless 
other women, then or whenever –  
is bent to the task of 
fabrication, of mending, remaking. 

She angles her body 
just enough to catch 
the visiting light, to work by it. 
The enigma of self-composure 
set forth in the painting 

is deepened by the black 
monotone of her gown –  
redolent of abnegation, yes, 
but richly enveloping, its power 
that of the boundless unknown. 

Fireflies 

I don't pretend to know anybody well. 
People are like shadows to me and I am a shadow. 
– Gwen John 

But true solitude allows for 
other kinds of companioning. 
In her life as an artist, 
Gwen John imaged women 

in serene, delving contemplation: 
seekers, sufferers, fellow-artists 
and the friends of her last years, 
the robed sisters of Meudon. 

And always, she dwelt in rooms 
such as this where shadows 
meet the given light softly, 
as if a pact had been made.

Once, when young, holidaying 
in Dorset, Gwen John, 
out on the cliffs in moonlight, 
wove fireflies into her hair. 
​
The light of nature, of whatever kind, 
a revelation, always. 
Darkness: its backdrop and servant, 
its antagonist, its lover.

Diane Fahey
​
​Diane Fahey, an Australian poet, is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently The Light Café, published by Liquid Amber Press in 2023, and Sanctuaries, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2024. She has received various awards and fellowships for her poetry, including the ACT Government’s Judith Wright Prize, and has been short-listed for six other major book awards. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from UWS for her study, 'Places and Spaces of the Writing Life.' <dianefaheypoet.com>

​The Cuckoo Clock

I confess, I bought it as much for me 
as for my parents on my travels in Europe,
still more daughter than woman,
still living at home between college semesters.
I wanted to witness the heart-carved attic doors 
of its latticed chalet body open 
for the cuckoo’s hourly call. Each time
the delight of it, never mind knowing
it was coming, the way a child laughs over and over
at Jack popping out of the box. From a clock maker
somewhere near the youth hostel nestled in the Alps, 
I sat and watched him fix watches, tiny instruments
fitted into equally tiny spaces, all to make time
tick on, for us to count the hours and days 
and get from here to there. My days
not so tightly wound, I went to Europe to feel
history, Eurail pass in hand,
long Indian print dresses and knapsack. Time
was on my side and I knew it, in no hurry
to become something other than myself. (Years later,
startled when asked what he wanted to be
when he grew up, my son replied, won’t I still be me?)
I loved the not knowing, how I could be 
as intricate as the gold-plated handles on the drawers
in the clock maker’s shop, my gears not yet meshed
to move in one constant rotation. The art of time,
never wasted, passed down to the clock maker
from his father, and his father before him, knowing
each second relies on the one before to get its bearings.

Joanne Durham

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Whale Road Review, Vox Populi, and many other journals and anthologies. She teaches workshops in ekphrastic poetry online and in person. Joanne lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visit her at https://www.joannedurham.com. 

Wishing you and yours a very happy holiday season, from The Ekphrastic Review.

It has been a tremendous ninth year as we continue to bring a wealth of literary talent in fiction and poetry to the world. Thank you to every writer in our archive, to all the artists now and in history, to all of our readers, and to our editors and social media managers: Sandi Stromberg, Kate Copeland, Christa de Brun, and Kate Bowers. THANK YOU. 

Here's to another wonderful year of creativity, art, and literature ahead.

wishing you all peace, beauty, and creativity,
​Love, Lorette

What Daedalus Did; or, What Joos de Momper Saw

(a poem about a different Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, or what Auden, Williams and Breughel didn’t see coming)
 
Fathers struggle to do the right thing. 
Their intentions are good, and Daedalus is no different. 
His face, turned up to the sky, flushes with pride 
as everything stills, everyone pauses 
to stare in awe at his beautiful, beautiful boy. 

The morning is pristine, a fresh palette hooked
on a painter’s thumb; as if every daub of colour
swirled from a new tube -- 

a red so red it seems to pulse straight from the vein, 
a blue so clean and untarnished, it could be the memory 
of blue before the invention of fire, 

before curls of smoke marbled the atmosphere, 
greens before they were green enough to be called green 
but were understood to be the reflection of holy gold 

when it still poured forth from the sky, scattering its beams, 
lighting the sea and the trees bent forward on the shore; 
the miraculous and mundane, side by side, 

on this stretch of simple canvas where he finds his light 
in the glorious glow of the youthful face, the youthful shape, 
as it soars beyond a father’s craziest dreams. 

Even as the body begins to plummet, twisting and torqueing 
towards him, his features remain dumbly fixed as if 
the boy still soars, as if the plowman hasn’t turned 

from churning rich clods of earth, as if the shepherd 
had not already gathered his flock to higher ground, 
for safety and a better view.

The fisherman’s rod goes slack in his hand, and everyone, 
sheep included, senses that something ominous 
is unfolding in the early summer sky.

They turn from their tasks and wait; ships unfurl
their sails only to crowd into the mouth of a safe bay, 
maneuver for a spot alongside the sturdy quays

Daedalus reaches for his tumbling boy 
whose arms and legs, half screened by black smoke 
and blue flames, spiral around the nucleus 

of his torso; the distressed, shredded wings 
flash before folding helplessly to gravity
and Daedalus, the inventor, finally sees 

the tsunami, the titanic rogue wave opening 
its unimaginable maw inhaling ships, towns, shepherds 
and flocks; plowmen and the hard--worked tilled earth 
just before the splash that will change everything.

Lisa Sloan

Lisa Sloans lives and writes  poetry in Charleston, SC. She enjoys the challenge of writing ekphrastic poems and of finding something new and surprising in a piece of art.  de Momper's piece particularly intrigued her because Pieter Bruegel's work of the same name inspired W.H. Auden ("Musee Des Beaux Arts") and William Carlos Willliams ("Landscape With the Fall of Icarus") to write two of the most well known ekphrastic poems of the 20th century.  She chose to write about the de Momper work because she saw a portent there that was not in the Breugel, and certainly not in Auden's or Williams poems about the work.