This won’t fit into your pocket
and it won’t put you on to the ‘net
but there are so many places you can’t drop it
and it doesn’t mind getting wet.
It doesn’t compete with today
and its digital glossy chronology
but holds to a steady display
of yesterday’s hand-wrought technology.
In gilded and courtly demeanor
it sniffs in aloof pantomime
though a smartphone is somewhat leaner
it’s unmoved by the passing of time.
Thanks yet again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
Austere and pallid
graceful hew
stilled and flowing
pas de deux.
Many more thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives
to sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld
and to the Newport News (VA) Public Art Foundation.
Begins the concert
before the music
in reverent wait.
Hear we in quiet
what we
anticipate.
Write we silent prelude
discarding daily
freight.
Still we the world
rushed
and inchoate.
Thanks again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
A swoosh can be heard as a sigh
and sometimes you can feel it go by
but here is a swoosh
of swoop and ruche
perspicuous to the eye.
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
If this is the way things grow
just the way Nature intended
then why does it look so faux
as though impasto emended?
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
I’m told this is a propeller
what a dismal truth
I want it to be a flower
in perpetual blooming youth.
Such Goliathan florescence
mere machinery!
Why can’t everything
be what I want it to be?
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
©M. O’Hern
There may be no lines in Nature, but there are lines in Geometry, where I learned that a line is an infinite series of dots, that we see only a segment of it as it stretches into infinity. That hurt my head.
Can’t a line be just a line? Must Geometry ruin more than an hour of the school day? Must it contaminate every sketch wherein a line suggests a form, a gesture?
These lines tell of a hand, our first tool and our last. If the lines stretch into infinity, how fitting that they take with them this transient tool. This hand, no longer useful, waits. My pencil reaches out, as does my heart, to that waiting, transcribing it to something see-able. Something tangible. Some way to show what I feel. Some way to keep my dad.
When I sketched this, I didn’t know he would die in two days. I only knew that I was seeing things that no one else saw. I was alone at his bedside, as usual. I am sure that, as it sketched, my hand was also reaching out. Would anyone ever know what this was like for the solitary daughter? Yes. Now you know.
If the line we see is only a segment of its infinite self, what does that tell us about everything else we see?
It flows then like the line that the simplicity of a sketch is not simple at all.
