1911
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| Marc Chagall, Bride with a Fan (1911), oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY |
1911
Europe is already loading the rifle backstage.
Yet here is this bride, hovering intact above history,
carried by pigment and impossible tenderness.
I look at her and think of every person
who has ever tried to protect beauty
with their bare hands.
The fan trembles slightly.
The village waits below like folded paper.
The fiddler keeps playing
against the coming century.
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This ekphrastic piece, based on the Chagall artwork above, was proposed by those anxious grooms over at DVerse Poets Pub.
I would love to know what you thought about this piece.
Please consider leaving a comment.
A profound poem. I discovered more with each reading. Love the village like folded paper and the bare hands projecting beauty--in contrast to the ones holding the rifles.
ReplyDeleteI love that you gave your ekphrastic poem a specific year and set the stage historically, Chris, with the bride hovering intact, ‘carried by pigment and impossible tenderness’ and the trembling fan. I especially love the simile ‘the village waits below like folded paper’.
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ReplyDeleteHi, Kim Whysall-Hammond here. This is an excellent, profoud poem. As Judy says, this bears re-reading.
ReplyDeleteGiving this poem a timestamp is genius - putting us in 1911 and Europe at the tipping point. As we may be once more.
And all those villages did fold like paper in 1914.
Powerful setting and significance in your poetic response to the art, Chris...not simply a bride but an era!
ReplyDeleteKnowing what happened later it seems particularly poignant... and though he grew up in current Belarus and had just arrived in Paris he must have grown up with the tensions of the Russian empire, and being Jewish probably had experienced progroms in that part of the world.
ReplyDeleteI love that second stanza.
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