Doreen LeBlanc: Two Poems

Edward’s Pout

Why the pout Edward Hopper?
Your many self portraits interchangeable
Turned down mouth
Empty eyes
Stoic
Sour
Brooding
Not a hint of a punch line
But always impeccably dressed
What lies beneath?

Your marriage to Josephine, Jo
Reads rather contentious, tumultuous
Yet she was your subject
Diminutive
Combative muse
Bedraggled nude
Expressionless
Perhaps eating from tin cans
Transformed you both to granite

Brushstrokes of simplicity
Your artistic gifts portrayed loneliness
Dark shadows
Deep thoughts
Solitude
Isolation
Until you created coastal scenes
Where you found light essence
And release

 

Musings on “Little Goose Girl” by Millet

What have you seen
Simple thatched house
Generations of simple folk
Who patched your humble walls

The geese at your doorstep
Years of harvest and famine
Like the seasons
And phases of the moon

Within, the acrid smells of your hearth
Beside you the giant tree
Your sentinel
Why does this interest me, you ask
Oh, I feel your heartbeat

 

(Poetry Workshop at Boston Museum
of Fine Arts, French Pastels, with Regie Gibson)

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The MFA Is Opening a Dreamy (and Rarely Shown) French Pastels Exhibit

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Copyright© 2020, by Doreen LeBlanc. All Rights Reserved.

Doreen LeBlanc lives in Massachusetts and spends time in summer and fall at her cabin in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where she was born. Inspiration bubbles up out of the river and sea, streams down the mountain, and comes through family stories and the beauty of Cape Breton and her Acadian and Scottish heritage.

 

Doreen LeBlanc: Two Poems
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