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      May 25, 2023The World BeneathDevon Balwit

      Image: “All of Us” by Lou Storey. “The World Beneath” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
      Peel the disappointed world
      back to its precursor—a child’s
       
      town of bright primaries, streets
      where the sun finds no impediment
       
      and the wind none richer,
      none poorer. No one suffers
       
      or dies there—not even one
      invisible dog sniffing the blue
       
      salt air. The boats in the harbor,
      the phone poles, the hills
       
      and the houses all speak
      a language before language,
       
      that tuneful hum above
      the shapes in a board-book.
       
      There even shadows hesitate
      to fall, mother nowhere
       
      in sight, the afternoon lazy
      and long.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Megan O'Reilly

      “As the title indicates, the poet imagines Lou Storey’s colorful and complex piece as depicting a ‘precursor’ to our current world (‘the disappointed world’), a more pure and essential civilization, and after viewing it through that lens, I can’t see it any other way. I found the language here to be irresistibly interesting, effortless lines that so aptly describe a place that doesn’t quite exist but is simultaneously more real than reality. I was particularly struck by ‘the houses all speak / a language before language, / that tuneful hum above / the shapes in a board-book,’ which I interpret as an incredible expression of the primitive way we experience the world as pre-verbal children, and a passage that will stick in my mind for a long time.”

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