Poems inspired by the art of nature
In this week’s Poet’s Corner, Linda Kohler offers two poems inspired by the visual arts.
Swarm
a response to an insect collage
by UK artist Tessa Farmer
All day I’ve been riding
demon bees
my bones shingled
forked, Hades origami,
all day the soft paper creases of sound,
swift, watery eyed, swooped flight,
spindled angels attacking dragonflies,
skeletal fairies
slicing flies.
I am in the midst
of a buzzing brown cloud,
is this war or busy spring?
Battles jet past my ear,
amputees chill my cheek,
fragmented blossom
in a magic microcosm
of life.
All day the protuberance
of an artist’s eye,
cased in stout looking glass,
and I don’t know
if I’m within or without
nature’s random, mad symmetry,
suspended on slender wire,
has once again survived
convention, schooling
and quarantine.
Chelonini
a response to a green sea turtle painting
by South Australian artist Kerryn Hocking
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She swims
unselfish
paddles pastel, green
tides
beneath a brown, teardrop
shell,
hands, turtle flippers
on a cold-pressed sea,
she splashes lime
and mottle
into the carapace
of stalls, noise
and other hand-mades.
On a rainy day
a hundred million years after
the first Chelonini
she swims
this ancient creature’s soul
to me.
Linda Kohler’s moving poem “Pirates” about the loss of her baby brother appeared in Poet’s Corner last month. Today she offers two poems inspired by visual artworks. “Chelonini” was written after a visit to the Meadows Country Market in the Adelaide Hills, where she watched South Australian artist Kerryn Hocking painting a watercolour of the green sea turtle, which she purchased. The mixed-media collage “Swarm”, by London-based artist Tessa Farmer, was exhibited at the Art Gallery of SA, on loan from the Saatchi Gallery in the UK. In it, each insect’s remains and tiny organic sculpture had to be disassembled and checked at quarantine here, before reassembly for exhibition exactly to the artist’s design.