Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      August 25, 2016Eco Echo: An Oldster’s TaleDevon Balwit, Suzanne Simmons

      Photograph: “Trespass” by Suzanne Simmons. “Eco Echo: An Oldster’s Tale” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2016, and selected by Simmons as the Artist’s Choice winner.
      old man remembers
      before we were here
       
      what it was like there
      he says listen before he forgets
       
      old man says green breathed
      bulged into food
       
      took sun and made air
      reached unfurled hung down
       
      old man says green lived
      that got under nails
       
      in dirt stuff
      hid things that crawled
       
      old man says green was noisy
      mouth blowing tiny
       
      happy or warning
      he shows me
       
      old man jumps off furniture
      trying to be light
       
      like green’s singers
      but he can’t lift up
       
      old man says green
      cold made it brown
       
      changed color
      heat yellow
       
      old man says it spoke
      he rubs his palms
       
      went hush hush in fast air
      and makes them whisper
       
      old man says green held him
      hid in its belly
       
      that he climbed on its shoulders
      gathered its scraps
       
      old man makes me feel
      green was like that he says
       
      knobbed knuckles and toes
      but rougher and stranger
       

       

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Suzanne Simmons

      “’Eco Echo: An Oldster’s Tale’ both surprised and haunted me. The notion of a world in which green is obsolete and yet people remain to describe it required a leap that I was willing to take—the old man convinced me. His descriptions of green are vivid and personal; he remembers green the way we remember lost loves. The words ‘eco echo’ fit well with my image because the photo is not a double exposure but a reflection in a windowpane. Like reflections, echoes are similar to their sources but not identical; they’re more mysterious. In the last two lines of the poem the old man asks his listener to feel his knobbed knuckles and toes, as if his efforts to describe green cannot compare to the felt sense of it, as if he could pass that knowledge from his own body to another’s. The poem left me feeling parched and thirsty for the color of new grass.”

      →

      Related