Day Fifteen: January Ekphrastic Challenge

Responding to all three works of art for Day Fifteen Paul Brookes’ Special January Ekphrastic Challenge.

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  -Kerfe Roig “Milky Way”

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  -Marcel Herms “We-are-little-children-of-the-sea”

• 

  -Christine O’Connor

Nothing and Something

From nothing, something—
a boom, a rush
of feathered light, star-dusted gas swirl-twirls
air, water into life. From the sea, we come
from the deep-water blue, crawling, falling, squalling
voices, reaching hands toward the azure sky—

from which, after the snow blows and goes,
spring rains pitter-pat on rocks and stones, and
from a pastel palette, petrichor will rise,
like birds, into the air,
but you won’t be here to smell it, or to see the flowers
emerge slowly from cold, dark ground. Treasures thought lost,
now found,

like time. Do we have more or less of it?

I don’t understand the time before time, without stars,
an infinite nothingness beyond black.

I know there’s a hole where you once were,
but it’s plugged with memories, an ocean, deep and wide. I can swim
through them, through the shadowed caverns, like a fish. At the surface,
the ripples gleam, like smiles—the water dances in the light.