the cello suites
are unsurpassed
yet something
in the way this lands
familiar yet different
every note
a leaf eased early
from a tree
—
Jean Morris lives in London, writes, edits, translates, takes photos and is a guest contributor to the Via Negativa poetry blog. Another musically inspired poem of hers was recently published in Writers’ Cafe Magazine.
Your Shadow
Five in the morning, when you
stumble out of bed to go and pee
then peek between the curtains
at the weather (blue enough),
there’s the shadow of this house
projected on the white façade
of the pretty house opposite,
like glimpsing your own shadow
on the face of a stranger facing you –
the shape of your sameness,
your difference, the disjunction…
Waking later to a sun higher
in the sky, dissolving everything
in frothing seaside light,
you walk along the shore and,
startled, see it still – that lovely,
unexpected shadow follows you.
—
Jean Morris lives in London, takes photos, translates from French and Spanish, and surprised herself last year by seriously getting into poetry. She most recently had some micro-poems published in Otata.
We sat outside the café
stretched our legs
and soaked our feet
in the pool of sunshine
that dimpled and flickered
with the shifting
and whispering
of the sycamores overhead.
We forgot that tomorrow
the clocks go back
that wet leaves will plaster
the chairs and tables.
With thanks to Dave Bonta and the Via Negativa poetry blog, where this was posted in October 2015.
—
Jean Morris lives in London, takes photos, translates from French and Spanish, and surprised herself last year by seriously getting into poetry. She most recently had some micro-poems published in Otata.
Mural with Matching Sky
On the corner by the pub car park is a new mural
after van Dyck’s Venetia Lady Digby on her Deathbed.
Let me count the ways this work inspired by a portrait
of a dead woman paradoxically fills me with happiness.
Huge and bright and apart from the rose mostly blue,
it’s by the German artist Claudia Walde, aka MadC,
a woman of bold vision and talent and about the age
Venetia Digby was when she died in her sleep in 1633.
What Claudia did here is such a surprise: a nifty project,
these “old master murals” by street artists talking back
to their chosen works in the gallery have flashed up
on blank walls and gable ends all over Dulwich, but
none has taken my breath, none makes me stop and
smile and ponder each time I see it the way this does –
a mistressful meeting of past and present, private and
public art, death and unrestrained but not unthinking life.
///
Links: Venetia Lady Digby on her Deathbed by Anthony van Dyck | MadC | Dulwich Picture Gallery
—
Jean Morris lives in Dulwich, south-east London, UK, where she writes, edits, translates from French and Spanish and takes photos. For the past six months she’s been contributing to the Via Negativa
Click on the first thumbnail image to enter carousel mode and view the full images–ed.
—
Jean Morris lives in south-east London, UK, where she translates, edits, takes photos, reviews books for Shiny New Books, and supports the campaign against Southwark borough council’s plans to replace the peaceful, much-loved wooded areas in the old cemetery with new roads and thousands of new burial plots.
