Letter to Georges Seurat, by Wilda Morris

La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat (France) 1884

Letter to Georges Seurat
           
I wasn’t surprised, Georges, by the pet monkey
in your portrait of Parisians sunning themselves
on the Île de la Jatte on a Sunday afternoon,
hint that one strolling woman was a prostitute. 
Nor was I shocked by how little movement 
you depicted as you stylized your subjects,
or the way you covered horizontal brush strokes 
with thousands of tiny points of paint. But there, 
toward the back of the canvas where a man leans 
against a tree smoking a cigar, your visual jest 
jolted me. Tell me, please, just what inspired you 
to paint that man’s smoke morphing into a little white dog.
And when the sun sank, did he take that wispy whelp home?

Wilda Morris

Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair of Poets and Patrons of Chicago and a past President of the Illinois State Poetry Society, has been published in numerous anthologies, webzines, and print publications, including The Ocotillo Review, Pangolin Review, Poetry Sky, Centrifugal Eye, and Journal of Modern Poetry. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku. Membership in the Art Institute of Chicago gives her access to many fine works of art. She was given the Founders’ Award by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in 2019. Much of the work on her second poetry book, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick (published in 2019), was written during a Writer’s Residency on Martha’s Vineyard. Her poetry blog at wildamorris.blogspot.com features a monthly poetry contest.