Ekphrastic Poetry from Brenda Clews

 My heart is playing

      Glenn Gould’s Sonatas – Fantasies Variations over & over, day after 

           day.    Sublime, tragic, joy-sorrow-

                                         ful, heart-rending, heart-

                       filling. 

      Vibrating strings pull the soul’s sinew, tiptoe over your grave of dreams. Awake to lull 

into neverending sleep. 


       So you dance, a marionette of his fingers, the sensitivity of his touch on your black

& white keys

                     cast 

in sunlight and shadows over the ground outside. 

                     Can your dangling feet dance faster? Slower?

Pitch

                                                                                                      of splintering

                                                                                  glass.

                                         A colossal public square,

                                                   churches and music halls,

                                                                                  crystal panes

          raining.

                               Sharp shards in air.

Empty courtyard,                                                        mist lit by a rising sun,

                                         the silverless mirrors, prismatic—

                                                                        never hit-

                                                                                        ting

                                         the catastrophe of ground.

Intense chromatic moments         of notes                             waver            in-process,

                                                              delicacy & trails & lively crescendos.

                                         Time becomes space.

                                                                                                                 Trill floating

                                                                        Escher glass-stairs of notes.

                               A cathedral of crystalline arrhythmic intervals.

                     Without tonal centres,

                               clusters echo clusters,

          flutes, violin, saxophone,

                                                                        this lullaby of gentle notes,

                                                              that tempest of cymbals drumming a glass-

                               bottomed boat torpedoing

                                                                        a furious ocean.

                     Loneliness, an open-ended disjunctive divine embrace.

                                                                        Fresh, clear

                                                                                             as the thrill of dawn.

Inspired by Tatar-Russian composer, Sophia Gubaidulina’s Modern Classical oeuvre.


Brenda Clews is a poet who dances. She’s had two books published, Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions, 2016) and Fugue in Green (Quattro Books, 2017). She’s also an artist, a video poet, an editor. and runs a quarterly poetry and singer/songwriter event called Minstrels & Bards in Toronto, Canada. Her website is brendaclews.com

3 thoughts on “Ekphrastic Poetry from Brenda Clews

  1. Superb work Brenda.
    Resounding work in concert with the musicians and composers you play upon.

  2. lovely crescendo and revitalizing parts friendship and poetry casting the shadow dancers upon more than one place thank you Brenda!

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