Adele Kenny Verse-Virtual 2014 December

December 2014

I’m a long-time resident of central NJ, where I’ve raised Yorkshire Terriers and small exotic birds for many years. A former creative writing professor, I’m founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor of Tiferet Journal. Ekphrastic poetry (poetry based on other works of art) interests me not as textual descriptions or verbal interpretations but, rather, as emotional, experiential, and spiritual responses to other works of art through written language.
Website: www.Adelekenny.com Poetry Blog: www.adelekenny.blogspot.com

T w o E k p h r a s t i c P o e m s

Why Blueberries?
Paul Cézanne - Blue Landscape (1903)
Oil on Canvas – 102 x 83 cm Hermitage, St. Petersburg

And why now, years after, do I suddenly think of you, the way darkness remembers light? This morning even the shadows are warm, the berries sweet, and I think of that one afternoon (our lips stained, fingertips blue). It was all you and then—all feeling. The whole world floated over us—almost touchable—as we lay in the grass and ate blueberries. Like most young loves, we ended sadly. What I remember is what lingered: a shining, silvery thing; the warbler that day, flight in its song. I think of you the way the living remember the dead—more than they were—a kind of loving.

In Memory Of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Beata Beatrix (1870)
Oil on Canvas 864 x 660 mm - Tate, London

No movement but this: subdued luminosity,
sunlight from the distant city. River. Bridge.

There is always a background (that far, this
close), and what memory does—like the dusky

lines of a double shadow, it multiplies loss.
In Rossetti’s Beata, a sundial casts its metal wing

on the thin, blown hour when leaving begins.
Red dove, white poppy: the woman, transfixed,

slips—diffused like light through darkened glass—
her hands open and soft. I am here and you aren’t.

It is summer—the sky is clapper and bell, the
lemonade sweet. I can almost hear you singing.