Welcome to Toad’s Blog Forum. Here’s where you’ll contribute to our issue-ly blog. If we love your response, we’ll ask you to send more for publication in our next issue.
This issue we’re featuring an ekphrastic publication; write about the painting, the poem, or both.
We will post your poem, essay, painting, song, anything, so long as it is creative, and talks to the works at hand.
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J.P. Dancing Bear and Julie Speed
Still Life With Suicide Bomber 1
after a painting by Julie Speed
Always this animated debate about the fruit
Eve pulled down from the Tree
of Knowledge. Others so certain
of Pomegranates. And a few
who believe in how the shape of a pear fits
the human hand like a grenade. The shadow
of fruit with stems can be man-
ipulated into the rough horn of a devil.
Think of the ear as pear shaped—
if only a human could hear like fruit does!
Imagine the music of pollination
each day, like a prayer-song,
and that this is as close to God
as you will ever come. That the pluck
of a stem is not defilement
but a rebirth—a renewal of faith.
If mouths are as silent as a pears
then seeds would be our common tongue.
I would speak my mind
in branches and leaves without fear
of another’s terrible blossoming hand.
How Van Gogh Lost His Ear
The myth dribbled down, saturated history
like Van Gogh’s bed, where he nearly died.
His ear sliced like prosciutto, given to a lover.
The truth cut cleanly, unwrapped whisper
of Van Gogh’s rasp into Gauguin’s ear.
Gauguin raged until a curl of cartilage
was gone, folded into cloth as a gift
to a prostitute who saved unseen strokes
of Van Gogh’s hands, unaware of trigger
that would still them. That left ear sits
to form a triangle that yearns toward
the corner of a squared white plate
shared with two gold pears ripened into
green songs with intact stems, as rooted
as Gaugin’s unbroken flesh when Van
Gogh repeated No one needs to know.
Did pears know his secret, whole and raw?
Gauguin grew closer in shed blood he drew.
Gauguin tried expel a madman, then recalled
him while painting a still life with apple, pear,
and mug, or while staring at bare Tahitian chests.