the sun is sparkling, the rain rumbling, and we badly need some poetry...

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

Neil Ellman - Three Poems


Echo of a Scream 
(after the painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros)

Hunger creates its own echoes
children without fathers
anarchic screams

there are no full bellies
in this part of Hell
no choice

as if the cries
of the infants
will harvest the land

as if the innocent
will join the Trinity
In peace—

hunger breeds
like echoing pleas
on a shrieking face.

Pink Angels 
(after the painting by Willem de Kooning)

Pink angels shaped from flesh
they wonder
at the wonder of desire

in their boudoirs
no resemblance of wings
old habits heaped in piles

tongues explore
each other’s mouth

secret crevices

dare they speak
    awakening pink?

dare they swallow
    their lascivious words?

Quartzeat 
(after the painting by Cy Twombly)

This
arrogance of line
stretching from the Pleistocene

presumptive
solitary
speaking in tongues

meandering

the gods
reaching down
touch the earth with

feeble strokes  
tentative

half man
whispering back
babel scratches/artifacts of sound

stroke it
before it disappears
with the curve of any word.