The following is a poem I wrote for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge back in February. Here’s a link to the original page and image that inspired this work:
This is just a single piece. A fragment of imagination as a childish
version remembers it. Patchwork puzzle piece across America where all
highways and blue skies with clouds look suspiciously the same.
Put it together with its brothers and sisters in a grid system of soft
cotton squares, up and down, side to side, neverending lines flowing
into each other can’t tell where one piece starts and the other part ends.
Brown and tan strips of land that is your land. Black asphalt roads from
tattered flaps of fabric mimicking broken infrastructure whose rough edges
can be seen as far as the eye can see but whose dangerous potholes hide in its
inky nature.Yellow threads pushed to the side just barely register as vague
fields of corn and wheat we hardly notice under our feet.
America the beautiful, so wide and spanning the color spectrum
but we only see a piece.