Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2016: Artist’s Choice
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.
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ECO ECHO: AN OLDSTER’S TALE
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old man remembers
before we were here
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what it was like there
he says listen before he forgets
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old man says green breathed
bulged into food
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took sun and made air
reached unfurled hung down
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old man says green lived
that got under nails
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in dirt stuff
hid things that crawled
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old man says green was noisy
mouth blowing tiny |
happy or warning
he shows me
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old man jumps off furniture
trying to be light
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like green’s singers
but he can’t lift up
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old man says green
cold made it brown
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changed color
heat yellow
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old man says it spoke
he rubs his palms
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went hush hush in fast air
and makes them whisper
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old man says green held him
hid in its belly
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that he climbed on its shoulders
gathered its scraps
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old man makes me feel
green was like that he says
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knobbed knuckles and toes
but rougher and stranger
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—Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2016
Artist’s Choice Winner
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Comment from the artist, Suzanne Simmons, on her selection: “’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 The notion of a world in which green is obsolete and yet people remain to describe it required a leap that I was willing to take—the old man convinced me.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.” (website)
