Sarah-Jane,
What a fantastic idea, to do a reverse-ekphrastic matching art to poem. Here’s a poem I never posted here or sent in or even considered worth revising, yet when seeking a poem that was expressed by a particular piece of art I love (and credit Mary Meriam for showing me), this was the only one that clicked for me, and suddenly I thought, tentatively, “maybe it’s not all that bad” so here goes:
Heartwrecked, Seeking Relief
Thoughts of you tucked softly just to cool the eye
when words like sticks and stones would scold the eye.
The radiance of your words, though disembodied, shines a way
where barbed-wire traps had ridiculed the eye.
The body finds a flightpath even without wings.
Even without you I feel your light, a jewel, the eye
I seek when my world whirls in madness and I’m lost.
Is this the center I can’t hold that fools the eye?
It’s neither place nor time, but emptiness—
a whole that never burns but rules the eye.
And yet I circle back, my mind in tow
to drink from your sweet nothing to console the eye.
I’m working hard to lose the word desire,
replace it with an aching that controls the eye
which always wanders through uncharted waters
with neither home nor anchor, something to hold the eye.
So I try smaller tasks and minor chords,
like mending seams to buttonhole the eye.
But naturally the heart will never yield its turf
to arrows that don’t pierce the soul, the eye.
The art is
here
The poem was not written with this picture in mind at all, yet somehow I felt they spoke to each other.