Tag Archives: ekphrastic

Kelly Scott Franklin, ‘ora et labora’

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toil and spin
we begin
wool, stone
cloth and bone
fibers break
fingers ache
scarlet thread
daily bread
sisters bend
knots end
warp and weft
right, left
kneel and weep
till and keep

the slanted ladder forms a stair
work is prayer

*****

Kelly Scott Franklin writes: “Alvarado’s painting depicts women kneeling, which I think first suggested prayer. As a Catholic, I’m aware of the Benedictine idea of work and prayer as a spiritual pair; but St. Josemaría Escrivá and the Opus Dei movement have also proposed that work itself, done with love and patience and offered to the Original Giver of Creation, can be itself a form of prayer. I had fun with the truncated lines, and I focused on selecting the most evocative physical objects and simple gestures interwoven with Biblical phrases. Maximum density. The poem was first published in Ekphrastic Review” 

Kelly Scott Franklin lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters. He teaches American Literature and the Great Books at Hillsdale College. His poems and translations have appeared in AbleMuse Review, Literary Matters, Driftwood Literary Magazine, Iowa City Poetry in Public, National Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews can be found in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Local Culture, and elsewhere. 
https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/kelly-scott-franklin/

Women Making Textiles, by Mario Urteaga Alvarado, 1939

Ekphrastic sonnet: RHL, ‘Ghosts of Dead Parents’

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Her ashes spread on Skirrid that she loved;
and his bones buried by the Harbour bay…
Why choose views for the dead? Once in earth shoved,
dirt in the dark is all they’d see, not day,
even if they lived. And if cremated, well…
So is it for our own guilt’s absolution?
Or status, that their graves our standing tell?
Or rites for social change’s resolution?
Those who were always here are here no more –
Their alwaysness runs out when they decease,
and life will now sound different from before,
like insect shrills not heard until they cease.
Dead ghosts sleep twittering in our heads’ domed caves,
waking to fill night skies from dreams and graves.

*****

This sonnet was published by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press as a response to their ekphrastic challenge for the illustration, a painting by Žofia Katriňáková. It was written for my parents who, although they died decades ago, are still a background to my thoughts. My father is buried by the bay of Governor’s Harbour, my mother’s ashes were scattered on Skirrid Fawr, the Welsh mountain she loved and lived within sight of in Abergavenny. And I have another short poem for them, published in the Amsterdam Quarterly:

In the night’s jam jar of my memory
my long-dead parents live as fireflies.
My thoughts of them worn by time’s emery,
their faint light still suggests where my path lies.

Is it reasonable to hope to be a firefly for your children and grandchildren?