Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2022

The Rose Robe

(La rose robe [1864] painted by  Jean Frédéric Bazille)


the rose robe glowed,
holding its own light,
as last sunlight shone
on white buildings
down there in the town.

she sat on a broad
stone ledge, taking
a break from house
and people too self-
involved to care about
a mild breeze 
that each evening 
met her and teased trees.

she rested her long, strong
brown arms, letting hands
lie on a night-black apron.
What she thought
was no one's concern
but hers. cool air

found her neck 
and shoulders. her tired
feet in gray house 
shoes napped on stone
like two cats.

she'd sewn the pink
robe's sleeves herself
before summer settled,
knowing how they'd 
sit above her elbows
on evenings just like

this one. like her,
women down in town
longed to linger outside
stuffy rooms,
to think, and to listen to
sparrows sing 
themselves to sleep 

as stray charcoal clouds
drifted across
a chalk-blue sky. 

hans ostrom 2022

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Read and See

I decided to do a recorded reading/video of "Read and See," which responds to Aaron Douglas's famous painting/mural (in oil), "Aspiration" (1936).

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGe5QCQBaKU

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Read and See

("Aspiration," painted by Aaron Douglas, 1936, oil on canvas, 60" x 60", Fine Arts Museum of
San Francisco)


Black chained hands rise. They have
become the shears of history and cut
through evil. Tilting, layered stars
share a central point that rests
on the right shoulder of a reading,
seeing Black woman. Read and see.

Two Black men stand on an indestructible
foundation. It goes by many names.
Read and see. The men's broad
shoulders defy the past and square
up with the future. Their jaw-lines
assert. One man points through
a spectral sun at pale green towers
and 36 lit windows on a mountain.

The lightning bolt is permanent in purple
skies. It portends the death of White
Supremacy, the Master Depravity.
The men carry necessary tools,
the most necessary of which
are spirit, body, mind. Read
and see. Aspiration is a prophecy.


hans ostrom 2017

Friday, June 9, 2017

Leonardo Showed Her Smile

Please consider starting
with this premise:
Ms. Mona Lisa's smile
is not mysterious.

Now you may release
the heap of stifling baggage,
and if you like,
enjoy the image as it is.


(after reading Leonardo Da Vinci, by Sherwin Nuland [2005].


hans ostrom 2017

Sunday, March 19, 2017

And the Feelings Thus Conjured

She's dipping her hands in the paint
that neuron networks manufacture.
She's rising from sleep and adorning
the darkness with bright looping
smears her fingertips eject.

The fog shows up, a loose collection
of gray blobs held inside a pale
amorphous balloon. There is a sound
of grinding, a sound of grinding,
a grinding, a sound. She says to no one,

"Sing with me: 'I am stuck on 
the balcony of REM sleep . . .!'"
We don't have to call it anything, you
know. We can just experience it
and the feelings thus conjured,

and live an entire lifetime
there in a mind-sponsored moment.


hans ostrom 2017

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

"Palette"

A blue owl, red sunflowers, and yellow horses:
such a scene may lift the spirit,
whatever the spirit is, whatever color.

A green road, a purple copse, and a black
bell tower: in such a context,
the spirit may become somber--

as brown becomes serious in a field of gray.


hans ostrom 2015

note: one of Christina Rossetti's children's verses refers to a blue owl and red sunflowers.