Recalled to Life, by Jo Taylor

Banquet Piece with Ham, By Willem Claesz Hedy (Netherlands) 1656

Recalled to Life
 
for my husband, upon his receiving first dose of experimental drug

Today you and I venture from our cocoon
near the medical center to the fine arts museum
about a block away to enjoy a few hours
of the respite for which art and verse are made.
The paintings speak as never before--
Heda’s Banquet Piece with its crumpled linens,
overturned silver goblets, half-peeled citrus,
and bread and oysters strewn across table;
van Dijk’s 1600s painting of Elisha’s meeting
with the Shunammite and her son, her only son,
having just returned to his mother in the land
of the living. And here we are, this April day,
ourselves a part of the canvases—we, the figures
in Heda’s painting, having hurriedly exited the
dinner table, the ghosts in van Dijk’s masterpiece
awaiting the call to new life.

Jo Taylor

This poem was first published in Georgia Poetry Society’s Reach of Song, Spring, 2022.
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Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia.  Her favourite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it.  In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire.  She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, ages four and seven, and collecting and reading cookbooks.

Elisha in the House of the Shunammite Woman, by Abraham Van Dijk (Netherlands) 1654