Contributor Series 7: The Confessional Diary of Bone
Horse’s Skull with White Rose
(after the painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1931)
By Neil Ellman
Picked clean
By the merciless sun
Bleached a white calm
Never to run again
In barren valleys
Vacant eyes
Remember running free
And wild
When wind
With delicate hands
Loosened the reins
And raised the dust
How brittle the skull
How perfect the rose
That propagates
In crumbling bone
Where death commands
The silent hills
And eyes are blinded
By the sun.
Neil’s most recent poem to appear at vox poetica was Tasting Words, which opened Contributor Series 6: A Currency of Words in September.
Sad, but yet how amazing Mother Nature clears the clutter.