Drawing by Susan C. Price
Munchkin
By Eric Meub
Munchkin
By Eric Meub
[Originally published on March 8, 2014]
That smile’s not just for anyone. You know
your falling houses, gingham dresses, To-
to too, with flowerbed discernments keen
enough to tell the good witch from the green.
Blank slate: that’s how Miss Gulch and kin may talk,
as if what matters most of all is chalk,
but bide your time: she’ll wipe and wax through black-
and-white to get her Technicolor back.
We won’t belittle you with what’s in store,
much less assume you’ll up and follow Dor-
othy’s rush, her ruby-slippered wonder dulled
by disappointment (nothing’s truly emerald).
We’d rather dance once more that not-in-Kan-
sas number where our yellow roads began.
| Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2020 by Susan C. Price & Eric Meub Eric Meub, architect, lives and practices in Pasadena, the adopted brother of the artist, Susan C. Price. They respect, in their different ways, the line. |
This poem wittily conveys a parent’s ambivalence to the reader, or to this reader, by the way it places me in a position unsteadily torn between imagining the youngster’s childhood and imagining her growing up.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know the term for poems that transform a drawing into an imagined portrait of somebody, if the artist had known the somebody or even intended the drawing to be a “portrait” in the first place? Reverse ekphrasis, perhaps? [The word ekphrasis, or ecphrasis, comes from the Greek for the description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.]
ReplyDeleteDefinitely not “reverse-ekphrasis,” which I have learned means “the representation of words into images, is likely more prominent in digital media than the previous definition of ekphrasis, the representation of images into words.”
Delete“Reverse-ekphrasis” would apply to Susan’s drawing, IF SHE HAD DRAWN IT FROM THE POEM. In general, it appears, “ekphrasis” itself applies to what Eric does.