Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters: August The eye must enter this blaze of grain that comes forward out of the frame, a blond forest of ripened light. The fastened sheaves march motionless on their legs of broken gold. They are becoming the reason for this day’s work, its stack and haul, in the ocher glaze of a centuries-old afternoon the wind rises through fresh each time we look. In the distance hills slipcase into hazed air, where always there will be an ocean waiting at horizon’s edge paced by tiny pale silhouettes of ships that come and go in delicate silence. A heedless sleeper with emphatic sprawl makes himself the hub of this wheel of harvest and hungering, the closed eye of this fecund calm. His paused desires are the tight nutmeat in the shell of this moment, secure in the clutch of all that cannot resist the spiral in to sleep. 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.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you. Join us on Facebook:
November 2023
|