After a single session,
I already regret my sign-up
for this ekphrastic poetry
course, cursing to you
the assignment I was given:
Mona Lisa, the fucking Mona
Lisa, like that hasn’t been done
a gazillion times
and yes, I won’t be able to fake it,
that everyone and their mailman
knows her visage,
are well-versed in da Vinci's flair,
and their lofty expectations
will be something I can’t deliver.
You ask me what our poet friend was given,
the one who always gets the lucky breaks,
and I tell you the Voice of Fire,
three lines of blue-red-blue,
vertically trite and prosaic,
that no one’s ever heard of Barnett
Newman because he sucks,
that I could have scrawled a sonnet
on my kindergarten days,
on a pair of simple colours,
how the Gallery
had been fleeced in ‘89,
caught up in the avant-garde,
how 1.8 million
could have gone to help the homeless,
paid for their chalets
and pedicures, covered
the cost and tip
for their tortellini
Bolognese;
but as it is,
I have to sleuth my way
behind that Delphic smile,
invent a tale of Giocondo,
that Leonardo
tried to paint her
minus mirth and maturation,
in 1499,
when his subject began to sob
from pent-up grief, reliving the death
of her baby daughter,
his Moaning Lisa a work of art
the Renaissance ignored
(bathing in their beam
of erudition), that even Machiavelli
said chin up, she needs a grin;
that when the time
arrived to try it all
again, da Vinci made a jest,
a side-splitter, that Lisa barely
smirked at his ill-timed droll,
that he hadn’t a clue
how it felt to love and lose,
consumed as he was with
innovation, invention,
his maps and magnum opus,
failing to heed
the red of blood and life,
her blue, blue mood.
Andreas Gripp
July 15, 2023
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