Day Four-Napowrimo-Embracing Couple

...today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.

Art by T K Padmini

Day Four-Napowrimo-Embracing Couple

 

In the late summer afternoon

When the languid air breathes fire,

I sweat under the Embracing Couple, basking

Under the blood moon and primary colours –

Their day was perhaps Red.

Entwined in a trance-like embrace oblivious to the world –

They feel like one rather than two bodies.

Their love seems to have stood the test of Time.

 

Padmini, you must have felt it in your bones—

Love or the lack of it to have conjured up the couple.

Your innermost realm seething and simmering

For something you constantly yearned for

Your canvas has those intentional solid strokes –

You breathe into it the darkness that enveloped you—

The tempering of your anguish.

You gazed beyond your age and times.

 

The painting, pulsating with love—a fragment

In the fabric of a larger story— akin to an elegy than a sonnet.

This is one of my favourite Padmini works and it hangs in the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi's Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Kochi. There's a dedicated section to Padmini's art housing her collection even her sketchbooks. Padmini passed away at 29 following complications after childbirth (her child didn't survive too), quite young leaving behind an incredible oeuvre ahead of her time. I always imagine what she would she would have achieved if she had lived on. Many more incredible paintings lost before they had the chance to be born. I dream of owning this someday, a part of Padmini's soul.

I am loving this year's NaPoWriMo theme...Ekphrasis. Each day I am looking forward to what's coming up. It's quite exciting and exhilarating maybe because it involves my my two loves - art and poems.