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| Nostalgia |
The prompt for today was:
Maybe one of the most common subjects in art is a portrait – a painting of one, singular person. Portrait poems are also very common. To get a sense of the breadth of style and form that these poems can take, take a look at Anni Liu’s prose poem, “Portrait Of,” John Yau’s, “Portrait,” and Karl Kirchwey’s “The Red Portrait.” Now try penning a portrait poem of your own. It can be a self-portrait, a portrait of someone well known to you, or even a poem inspired by an actual painted portrait. (If you’re looking for one to inspire you, why not check out the online collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery?)
And here is my poem:
Portrait of My Grandmother at Thirty-Six
In the photograph, her hands are folded—
neat origami of flesh and bone,
resting on a lap I never knew as young.
The light catches on her wedding band,
a thin gold circle bright as a small sun.
I search for myself in the slope of her nose,
the tender curve where neck meets shoulder.
They say we share the same eyes,
though hers knew a different century,
skies before they filled with satellites,
oceans before they swallowed islands.
What the camera cannot capture:
how her fingers smelled of garlic and thyme,
the way she hummed when she thought no one listened,
how grief folded itself into the corner of her mouth
after her fifth-born slipped away one winter.
I want to reach through the decades,
press my palm to her cheek still smooth with youth.
Tell her that the girl not yet conceived
who will become my mother
will name her daughter after wildflowers.
That someday I will stand in her kitchen,
roll dough with her hands—my hands—
inherited vessels of memory and flour.
That I will learn the language she abandoned
to survive in a situation that demanded her silence.
The photo curls at the edges now.
My thumb smudges her shoulder—
this touch, the closest we will ever come
to existing in the same moment,
her ghost and my flesh meeting in-between.
