New Poetry by Neil Ellman
Academy
(after the painting by Cy Twombly)
Scrawls on the hide
of a whale
almost words
more than scrawls
almost more than words
a kind of history
of victories & defeats
rough encounters
in dangerous seas
mad love
crawling syllables
ampersands
asterisks
slashes
coherent by half
call out
wounded
its migration done
it crawls to land
to teach its young.
Invasion of the Night
(after the painting by Roberto Matta)
Time, times, and a half
the wicked judged
you and I
our bodies
chased and caught
invaded by the night
and crushed
upon a darkling sky
as stars burn out
flames from a lick
chaos in a jar
an absence of civility
and light
in our final hour.
— by Neil Ellman
Copyright ©2012 by Neil Ellman. All Rights Reserved.
Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey. His poems, many of which are ekphrastic and based on works of modern and contemporary art, … Click to continue . . .