NaPoWriMo Day 17: Eyes without & other poems

 
Day 17 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt:  The surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington moved to Mexico during the height of World War II, where they began a life-long friendship. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.
 
 

Eyes without

Eyes out of glasses,
abstraction without guise,
a near-sighted flirtation
bereft of Confucius says.
 
Imagination surprises, implies
a conversation takes place,
this meeting without minds.
 
Glasses flutter their eyelashes,
masked in mascara, witnessing
cosmetic lies in transfiguration.
 
Old blue eyes never knew
what he leant his signature to
until they sat on a tabletop
suspended in thin air,
eager to take flight.
 
 

Scarlet

She unwinds a ball of blue wool,
protector of sea and sky
in search of the waiting shore.
 
It sneaks inside his ribcage,
piercing all his guarded walls,
knocks until his world opens wide,
a corridor into the dark,
his twisted labyrinth.
 
From its depths flies one red falcon,
trailed by a single white dove,
passion and peace out of balance.
 
He is but shadow,
a disembodied ghost of memory,
her melancholy, her wanderings,
her protector in the darkness.
 
Like a shawl, her red hair trembling
touches the seat of the chair,
anchors her in this world.
 

 

The wheel

Bringer of night’s curses,
fireworks implode into pitch
around his skeletal endeavours,
splatter the blood of his foes,
stuff of nightmares, grating,
all engines of power paralysed.
 
He carries hate as his holy shield,
seeks to neuter the gods,
protects no one, tells no tales.
 
Traversing the nine levels of hell,
he pursues light in darkness
to quell and destroy,
the great wheel of bones turning
where no tide will ever flow.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 2025