Poetry About Art

Please visit my website Poetry About Art [will be live soon] a collection of my poems inspired by art. See a sample poem below.  

Poetry About Art also features:

  • information about poems written by other poets, past and present, who have been inspired by art;

  • research and information about art from prehistory to today that has inspired poems and other writings;

  • information about the different types of written responses poets and writers have to art;

  • instruction on ways to write poetry inspired by art.

Sun Shining Through


Inspired by the painting by Eric Wallis

By Mary Dezember

 

Sunday morning: the sun has risen to bless

all of Earth with its healing of light and heat.

She walks in her garden, stops to feel the sun

at her back, reveling in its pronouncement,

how it etches itself onto its flowers, its ferns,

its leaves, and her.

 

When she raises her arms behind her head

to the simple wooden barrette holding her hair

the sun shines through her thin white gown

making her position with the light look like wings

and celestial shine, a bodily halo, an aura; she appears

as an angel on Earth. 

Only nature frames her.

 

Though she could, at any moment, raise her

arms higher and she would be gone, taken up

by the charm of the ethereal, her gaze keeps her

grounded.  Underneath her sun-filled gown, she is

human.

 

She is thinking of him and of herself and of all

of Earth's children as she gazes to the life force

of our Mother.  She sees the life that seemingly

magically and divinely-ordered springs from Her,

this parental planet that keeps us magnetically,

chemically, and genetically

bound to Her.

 

This angel's wings are not wings. 

They are arms thinly covered

in the Earth's fabric made glistening and new

by this fresh day. She has chosen

to stay here, in this garden of life.

She lets down her hair.

 

 

"Sun Shining Through" by Mary Dezember was first published in Fixed and Free Poetry Anthology 2015, edited by Billy Brown, Mercury Heartlink, 2015: 227-228.

The poem is included in the book Still Howling, Poems by Mary Dezember, published 2016: 11-12.

The painting Sun Shining Through by Eric Wallis is depicted on the cover of the book Earth-Marked Like You, by Mary Dezember, published by Sunstone Press, c. 2011