The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead

Poetry After Pam Chadick Aloisa, by  Thomas Mcguire, Sarah Nance, and Jessy Randall

4/20/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Lily of Peace, by Pam Chadick Aloisa (USA) contemporary. Click on image for artist site.

Peace Lily (with Peace Walls Leading to a Haiga)

1.
Good fences make good neighbours
So chimes the grey-haired poet.
But what of walls?
 
2.
Sometimes it takes a wall to keep the peace--
That’s what the Ulster Irish say and exactly 
What I saw standing on the Falls Road, Belfast, 
Where that straight thoroughfare of spite flanks 
The Shankill Road.  There it towered, a wall aloft,  
A wall for peace, formed from iron, brick, and stone, 
Plus shards of broken glass, whatever they could grab 
To launch their peace-complacent wall higher, 
Higher into the Ulster sky into the British heaven— 
Each day before my foreign eyes it rose and rose
To strech its stated end: corral the hate,
Defend against the dragon and keep the peace. 
 
3.
And in the middle of the picture sits a single 
Lily, a lily in a painted pot at the center 
Of a space made safe, secure by surrounding
Walls—imposing, four-square forms wrought
From brick and rock and mortar—stiff stuff set 
Firm and tough enough to keep the peace.
 
4. 
And the memory-keepers sang:
The burning walls and tower 
                                   And Agamemnon dead

And Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
      Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
 
5.
Since so much depends 
Upon a painted lily in a pot
Safe within its walls,
Strange it seems how no  
One really sees the flower 
Yet the peace it promises
That’s the power people love 
(It’s what they lack and long for) 
So they cheer the lily’s unseen
Blossoming—a gift of hope, 
A hope that drives out fear, 
For this they cheer, raising
Signs and songs unto the lily 
In the little painted pot  
Safe within the walls four-square.  
 
6.
Three times Achilles chased him 
Round the walls and towers
Ringing Ilium, three times Hector
Passed his wife and kin atop
The ramparts gasping, groaning
As the son of Peleus gained ground
On the fleeing prince. Then the fourth 
Time round the walls sorrow swept
The crowd who watched their lover, son 
And brother fall--
                      Death’s dark curtain dropped . . . 
And round the walls, Achilles dragged the prince
Dragged his corpse face down behind his glinting 
Chariot through the bloodied mud and dirt. 
 
7.
Sometimes it takes a certain kind 
Of wall to strike what’s called a 
Separate peace, at least that’s what 
I mean to say to end this painful 
Chain of word and image verse--
                 
8.
So in that spirit here’s a haiga, 
A picture and a poem in tandem
About a man named George, 
George Yamasaki born in Osaka,
But raised in Northern California, 
A man they tried to cage and break 
Behind a fence of coiled concertina wire,
A man whose soul they tried to snuff
Stealing his nursery, trashing his orchards, 
Torching his home when war broke out in ’41. 
But George refused to break, refused to die, 
Refused to fade away like lilies of the valley--
And when the war was done, home he came  
To the rolling hills round Auburn,
Then set to work raising walls again, 
Rebuilt his life stacking quartz and granite
Not just to feed his boys and wife . . . No, 
George showed that though they tried 
To bend and bow him like a bonsai, to cage
Him like a magpie, he refused to bow or break:
 
             Back from camp at Tulelake   
                Yamasaki built these walls
             Freestones in mortar

Thomas McGuire
Picture
George Yamasaki Quartz and River Freestone Wall (Auburn, CA) by Thomas McGuire (USA) 2021
**
Picture
Light Up the World, by Pam Chadick Aloisa (USA) contemporary.

In the Year of the Drought

We pray for a good year the way my grandfather
once prayed for rain for the field below
his house, the water that would make that red Carolina soil run
like blood across the drive. The good year: annus mirabilis
they call it, the year of wonders— Newton at 23, writing the law
of universal gravitation while Cambridge locks its doors
against the plague, an equation cold comfort in a graveyard full
of his friends. 


                            Outside the water pools over gutters, forces
itself against basement windows but when I pull the kitchen
curtains in the morning’s dim haze, the ground is still dry.
Could this be the good year? the wonder we feel has turned
to something else entirely, venom rising at the back
of the throat, marching toward what burns and writhes 


in the dark—our insides turned out on TV, while the midwife
undoes clasps and ties to make the birth easier, not a knot
left in the house. What I bring into this world is more
of the same: the apple falling from the tree, the torch
turned into candle, grief upon grief. 

                         
                                                                              Late at night,
I think I hear you fall in the bathroom in a dark house—
but you’ve been in bed for the past three days, unable to walk
or raise a glass of water. Don’t you know we all become
the same things in the end? In this year without rain, all the window
ledges are bare, open to let in the night air and to ease
the inevitable birth pangs of a world made more undone
                                                                                   with each arrival. 


Sarah Nance

Picture
Carry Your Candle, by Pam Chadick Aloisa (USA) contemporary.
A Wave inside a Wave

Maybe they were slippery because they were swimming
Maybe they were surfing and they caught a wave inside a wave

Maybe they were waving hi
but their hello wave 
had undercurrents
of goodbye

Maybe they were a political movement
and inside a loud and forceful wave
there was a smaller quieter wave
pulled along by the bigger one
shushing out onto the beach
just inside the one wave
arrives another wave

**
​
Burning Down the House

Fear turns a light breeze into a tornado. Don't forget: every time you make dinner you create one or two little fires in the kitchen. That's you, you're the little fire, you're not hurting anything, not yet.

"Those two are getting along like a house afire," our friends said. It's true, we were as compatible as sandpaper and a match. We stayed together to the end, which came fast.

Don't worry, ladybug. Your children won't necessarily combust, no matter what you've heard. It's the poem that's blazing up, from the kindling of the bad rhyme. HOME and BURN, ladybug. BURN and HOME.


Jessy Randall

**

A version of this sequence was exhibited at Bella Art in Monument, Colorado in September of 2021.
​

“Burning Down the House” first appeared in Injecting Dreams into Cows (Red Hen, 2012).

​**

Pam Chadick Aloisa has had paintings exhibited regularly in many juried, invitational, and solo exhibits regionally, nationally, and internationally. She recently won first prize at the Wills Creek Exhibition and her art also was published at Brooklyn Art Library and Academic Quarter at Aarhus University in Denmark. Pam is an art professor and Director/curator of the art gallery at the U.S. Air Force Academy. https://aloisaart.com

Thomas McGuire is an ecopoet and the editor of War, Literature & the Arts. He resides in the rain shadow of Pikes Peak in Colorado. His creative work has appeared most recently in the North American Review, Poetry for the More-Than-Human-World, Southeast Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, and Open-Eyed, Full-Throated: An Anthology of American/Irish Poets (Arlen House, 2019). His poem "Four Ways of Looking at Magpie--A Most Becoming Bird" appeared in Best New Poets 2020. 

Sarah Nance is a writer and an assistant professor of English. Her creative work has been published in 
Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Parentheses, Belletrist, and elsewhere. Her critical work on literature and poetics has appeared in journals and venues such as Arizona Quarterly, Literature and Medicine, ASAP/J, Amodern, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Colorado Springs, where she teaches writing and directs the student-run arts journal Icarus.
​

Jessy Randall’s poems have appeared in 
Poetry, Scientific American, and Women’s Review of Books. Her most recent collection is How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems (Pleiades, 2018). A new book, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science is forthcoming from Gold SF / University of London in 2022. http://bit.ly/JessyRandall Twitter: @randall_jessy
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    The Ekphrastic Review
    Picture
    Current Prompt
    COOKIES/PRIVACY

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Join us: Facebook and Bluesky
    @ekphrasticreview.



    ​
    ​Archives
    ​

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015

    Lorette C. Luzajic [email protected] 

  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead