The Art: A photograph by Lawrence Sumulong from his series "Manila Gothic"
Lawrence discusses the portrait: “Love, 9 years old, a witness to the death of her parents Adrian and Vivian Peregrino in Camarin on August 25, 2016 during the ongoing Philippine Drug War. She has 5 other siblings and is presently staying with her aunt. Her other siblings are scattered among other relatives. This is a formal portrait that my friend, Rica Concepcion, and I set up with a gravedigger and florist to create a wreath of indigenous and popular Filipino flowers that are associated with death and funerals. This photo was taken in a church and safe house in barangay Bagong Silangan, Quezon City.”
The Exercise: This portrait of Love has such power that I think it makes sense to keep our exercise simple. I've tried to keep the steps very open-ended, but have offered a bit more structure (optional) at the end if you're feeling stuck.
We'll take our classic ekphrastic start: Set a timer for two minutes and devote this whole time to observation of the artwork. No need to take notes. Just try to keep your attention in the portrait, noticing details of its composition.
Take another two minutes to write down a literal description of the photograph. Try not to look at the artwork until the end of your description. Did you miss anything? Fabricate anything? Both are fine, just good to notice.
Take another two minutes to observe the portrait, this time with particular attention to your own thoughts an feelings as they arise during observation.
Free write! This writing can take any form -- poetry, a story, stream of consciousness, or fragments of thought. If you're feeling totally stuck, maybe start from the following premise: Write a letter to Love. Please share your creations in the comments below!
I woke up at 6 this morning and discovered the dialogue I should have written yesterday. So I've worked on that today, too.
Love
She didn't die--
She's newly born and frowning slightly,
Deciding whether or not she'll suck in that cyanotic air
She will gasp in a minute, and smile
Or she will not
Those flowers--they're always there at the end
Sometimes the beginning too
But beginning blooms are sun and color and petals sailing
Flowers at the end are waxen and wrong
We leave them behind so we don't witness their droop and demise
Foretelling our fate.
She's still so quiet
But not serene--angry?
Or defiant--waiting to warn us
Or to dance one day with sun blooms in her hair
I'm beyond delighted to hear that this class sparked a little extracurricular writing/revision!! I hope it was fruitful and fun :D My two favorite lines from this gorgeous poem:
Deciding whether or not she'll suck in that cyanotic air
and
Or to dance one day with sun blooms in her hair
I just can't get over how good the alliteration is that first line, how incredibly right the descriptor "cyanotic" air! It feels so right for the atmosphere of this portrait, as well as accurate to the artwork, a cyanotype, itself! Wonderful. Thank you.
I love the second verse about the flowers signifying both beginnings and endings - new life, but also death. I can see how it relates to yesterday's prompt as well! The last line also hits hard with the use of the word "bloom" to describe the sun on the girl's hair, evoking the imagery of flowers again. Wonderful!
Love
she could be dead
maybe, she is
at least, for a moment,
floating above,
drifting, rootless
her father, her mother
hand in hand in hand
looking down on us, us.
do you see her? do we? do I?
shadows of eyes,
face burrowed by sorrow,
mouth closed, hushed, wordless
a girl, just a girl
do you see her?
I so appreciate that this poem asks us to bring all our attention and care into seeing Love, seeing her clearly as a young girl. I also really loved that this poem brings in a layer of backstory about our subject, the idea of her parents nearby, bringing the artists's process and practice into the ekphrastic and thereby deepening our appreciation of the work. Thank you!
Loved by Love
To be loved
by the flowers
was what I wanted,
to be the flowers
loved by Love
is what I had.
I was so moved by this little poem, this quiet, profound meditation on love and being loved. There's something incredibly potent about the restraint and simplicity here, it feels like a koan!
Sorry to bail yesterday! Here's what I got today:
Man 1 loaded up the flowers into his van. He’s got a few batches in there, a few different arrangements destined for different drop offs. He could’ve probably guessed the occasion for each bouquet, but preferred to maintain an air of indifference. Wreaths and bundles exploded with variety, with colors both naturally occurring and occurring due to taken up by the severed stems. They made for a dazzling sight with the van’s sliding door fully ajar. When Man 1 shut the door extinguishing their light source, well, flowers mean next to nothing in darkness.
When asked what line of work he was in, and Man 1 replied he worked for a florist, people often assumed the best. Their tone softened, their eyebrows inflected upwards, and they oohed and ahhed as one does when confronted by an overwhelmingly cute puppy. Treating Man 1 like a sensitive aesthete in the circle of Oscar Wilde always followed their remarkable discovery that the man in conversation worked with flowers.
“Oh that must bring you such joy!”
“Your life is filled with such color, that must be wonderful!”
“Sure smells nice I’d bet, the fragrances are delightful, right?”
And so on.
The van carried on through traffic in a perfectly conventional pace, stop and go. Flowers were never an emergency and he was never in a rush. Usually, the action precipitating the event requiring white lilies (affair revealed) or orange celosia (dog’s birthday) had already occurred. A bouquet signaled denouement, not climax. Most of the time, a nice card or candid explanation would go a lot further than decapitated plants in a jar. That and flowers often headed toward tragedy. One part flimsy distraction, one part “okay its time to move on with you life”.
Today, Man 1 had three hefty wreathes of those yellow and blue ones. He’d rather not dwell on their destination or even acknowledge them at all, but that rambunctious contrast of color, the yellow vibrating as if attempting to escape the mournful blue, made them hard to ignore. Perhaps it was this loud, distracting quality that made them fit in so well at funerals. They were sure to provide an oasis of ignorance to those looking to stay out of the grieving process and away from the ones most affected by tragedy. Man 1 upped the volume of the senseless talk show now blaring from the speakers; this was not a train of thought he desired to follow.
What a great opening to a story! I'm very interested in Man 1 right away -- just on name a lone (lightly dystopian, shades of George Saunders, whose short stories you'd love if you haven't read!). In so many ways his struggle is universal: the world tempts him with its joys, its beauties, it's interested acquaintances, and Man 1 is moved but reluctantly, maybe he is even afraid to be moved. And yet, in spite of himself, he images the flowers' various destinations. They way they are never urgent, but always important.
Lines that stuck with me, that felt like they embodied our main character's voice and started laying out how me might change over the course of the story:
well, flowers mean next to nothing in darkness.
and
Flowers were never an emergency and he was never in a rush. Usually, the action precipitating the event requiring white lilies (affair revealed) or orange celosia (dog’s birthday) had already occurred. A bouquet signaled denouement, not climax. -- This has all the makings of a great short story -- relatable character, high specificity, emotional stakes. I'd love to see where it goes!
Though we claim to be whole people on our own, none of us truly are. We are all made up of others. We are our mothers, fathers, siblings, and dearest friends, all interconnected, like a tangle of wildflowers growing together, their roots entwining below the earth. Those we love make up who we are just as much as the DNA in our cells. Maybe that is why when someone we love dies, a part of us dies too. The fairytales and children's stories got it wrong. They told us that love can resurrect the dead - the lifeless princess on a bed of roses saved by true love's kiss. In truth, love does not, and never has, brought anyone back to life. The truest mark of love is that it kills you. None of us are whole on our own, and no one who has lost a loved one is fully alive. Those who have lost someone may appear to be vibrant and breathing, but we are merely cut flowers, our decaying petals flaking off day by day. If love could save us, it would have done so long ago. Instead, we live while others die, and keep our fragmented souls sealed away in our fragile bodies, begging to be shattered. I do not believe this means we should live without love to avoid being broken. What is a life without love, but a seed that never grew, and never knew life above ground?
Ah, that line - "The truest mark of love is that it kills you." Wow. And the image of being "merely cut flowers" after a loss is so powerful. Thank you for this moving work.
I never associated blue with death. Then my dad died. Not a dark blue
Not a royal blue
More like a sky blue...
mixed with deep water.
I didn’t wear black to his funeral.
I wore a blue flowered dress.
Before he died I drew a self portrait.
I drew myself blue.
Sky blue skin
Deep water blue eyes
I look back at it now and wonder
Did I already associate blue with death?
Dear Amanda, Thank you for this poem. I love the repetition of the word blue, almost like a prayer or spell. I keep returning to the line, " I drew myself blue." I love the internal rhyme of drew/blue but also the way the line feels like it can be read so many ways, both literally and metaphorically. Lovely.
Just now, she closes her eyes beneath the funerary flowers meant to drape the coffins of her dead. She drifts, as in a field, through the pungent gardenia, the soft rosal, the delicate katmon.
Just now, a furrow crosses her brow recalling the changing moment. The flash of the slaughter snaps through her like lightening. A shock so real, even now, it illuminates the white flowers in crackling azure light, their cheery yellow centers transmuting, hollowing into diaphanous flames.
Just then, five days ago, when she was a child, her mother took her to the backyard to cut the tender catmons, the chrysanthemums, placing them into her arms like newborns. She carried them ever so gently into the house, the screen door slapping shut behind her.
Just then, in the kitchen, she delivered them into clear jelly jars full of blue dye and watched through the afternoon as the veins of the petals took up the dye, glowing cerulean in the late afternoon light.
Just now, flat on her back she settles into that moment, as the flowers enshroud her, her eyes rest in the cradle of their sockets.
Just now, she will not weep.
Just now, she is complete.
There are so, so many astonishingly beautiful lines in this little flash of a story! I keep returning to the vision of the flower centers turning to flame. The way sound details like the snap of shock and the slap of the screen door are set against each other helps the reader understand how the speaker of the poem is in a place of transition between worlds, between childhood and the sudden loss of her parents, between before and after -- it's so moving. And I love that you bring us to a moment of peace at the end, a moment of rest. It feels like a comfort and a generosity. <3
A Living Thing, Desire
The dead aren’t the only ones who close their eyes. Close them now to feel a good thing, like the gloss across your lips, or close them to wish for something better. Close them, too, to stop something bad before it’s seen. Shut eyes could never hide a face that wants something—to emerge from anemoned flowers, to burst free and not be buried.
Fierce and lovely, thank you, Abbey. I found myself close to tears after reading the line, "close them now to feel a good thing, like the gloss across your lips..." I had to return to the picture to see that yes, Love's wearing a little gloss. This small detail brought her humanity and her sheer youth -- she's a child! -- home to me in a profound and deeply moving way. Such recognition. Thank you.