Arts Alive San Antonio

As promised, ARTS ALIVE SAN ANTINIO, will publish the winning entries in the NPM San Antonio Ekphrastic Poetry Contest, in installments. Here’s the first one. Of the four artworks selected by San Antonio Museums as inspiration for the poets, most contestants chose to respond to the piece the McNay Art Museum picked, “Sarah # 9” by Heidi McFall. Below are the three adult winners’ poems.

DAY NINE
By Diane Gonzales Bertrand

When she looks at me,
storm clouds appear
in her distance
way, wat back
coming from the place
where she thinks
she knows the answer.
Lightning flickers
makes her pause
the question of rain
shadows the rim of her lips.

FACE
By Ramiro Rodriguez

Woman’s face in front of my face,
universe of luminous insects behind the eyes.
We are all born from her
in an unfolding od bodies.
Nobody say never.
We all arise from her womb
in a saturation of waves without foam
and every morning, as the eyes light up,
I understand that origin
is an inexplicable tunnel of stars
in the black and white of her face,
of my face,
nobody’s face.

To Dust She Shall Return
By Janice Bethany

Leaving Plato’s cave, her profile flashed on
the wall. She enters 2021,
Lenten Ash print on her head. The world is
closed, no one to notice her, just stone and
glass tombs, empty streets. She hoped to
apprentice, study nature and function,
to give to and liberate the prisoners
locked in the cave. But she is stoic, lips
tight as Sphinx’s, no dialogue afloat
on democracy. Her enigmatic
stare is apt and deep, unaware of this
republic’s chaos beneath. She turns back
to the cave, an empty knave, back to
the dark, to the dust whence she came.