“Alone in Love” by Mary Meriam

June 23, 2016Posted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016: Editor’s Choice

 

Painting by Catherine Edmunds
Painting: “Castlerigg” by Catherine Edmunds. “Alone in Love” was written by Mary Meriam for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016, and selected by Timothy Green as the Editor’s Choice winner.

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__________

Mary Meriam

ALONE IN LOVE

She isn’t mine. I am alone in love.
Inside my mind and soul, I moan in love.

The sound is pearly shell. The sound is slight,
only a cell of sound, a stone in love.

My flower bed so lavishly in bloom,
my elm tree’s swelling leaves, my own in love.

Those fragile fantasies of love I drew
erased in anguish, overthrown in love.

She hasn’t ears and eyes for this, old fool.
Impossible, your monotone in love.

Just face it, Mary, time is running short.
Love less, or you will die alone in love.

—Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016
Editor’s Choice Winner

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Comment from the editor on his selection: “As artist Catherine Edmunds mentioned last week, the best ekphrastic poems tend to be those that use the source image as a doorway into something new. In this well-crafted ghazal, Mary Meriam seems to draw on the emotion of the stark angled strokes and color palette of the painting, but makes the leap of personifying what seems to be a rock at the center, transforming it into an image of lost love and loneliness.” Learn more about Mary Meriam at her website.

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