La Llamada (The Call), by Kendall Dunkelberg

La Llamada, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain). 1961.

La Llamada (The Call), Remedios Varo (Mexico), 1961

In the courtyard of stone caryatids
               one figure comes to life
a woman bathed in gold starshine, her robes
               emanating incense and light
her face, the face of the Madonna
               her hair, wild orange-red,
a swirling umbilicus still tied
               to the evening star, Venus
high in the dark sky above
               this massive courtyard
where women’s figures emerge
               from limestone walls
surrounding her, yearning for 
               her freedom and life

Kendall Dunkelberg

Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. Dunkelberg has published the poetry collections Barrier Island Suite,Landscapes and Architectures  and Time Capsules, and a collection of translated poems by the Belgian poet, Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including recently inThe Texas Review, About Place, and Town Creek Poetry, Postcard Poems and Prose and in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vo. 2: Mississippi. His introductory multi-genre creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft was published by Palgrave MacMillan, and he is editor of Poetry South and advisor for Ponder Review. www.kendalldunkelberg.com