Performers painted like tigers and hunters dance to drumbeats
on the fourth day of Onam, an annual harvest festival of Kerala.
Dancing Tiger
Many farms have been buried,
yet the harvest fest is dazzling.
He’s one among the hundreds
of human tigers in the street.
A coat of varnish and tempera
powder conceals his skin. Pain,
paint odor, itch…he endures.
Drumbeats begin. He pounces,
shaking his hippo-belly. A
tumor also dances like death.
His fatigue and nausea vanish
in the artistic fervor. There’re
hunters with bows and arrows,
dancing around him. As night
grows, waves of music abate
to end. Spectators go home
with the stars. Now he sits
in sweat under the bare sky.
First published in Typehouse Literary Magazine
Categories:
tempera, dance,
Form: Free verse
Iridescent ivory beams
stream
through trunks
lining the lane
as through stained glass.
Rubies and honey glow
in the leafy tempera
of a sistine oak canopy.
In the sable silence
of autumn's crisp matin
I look up to see Adam
reaching
to touch the hand of God.
Categories:
tempera, autumn, imagery,
Form: Ekphrasis
Proof of pudding lies on palate
Not on plate
Sweet pudding is sweet
Even if mixed with pellet.
Pudding over-eggs are best
In artist’s palette-tempera
[Epigram]
Categories:
tempera, fun,
Form: Epigram
Helios, open darkened shutters Night did seal;
Nyx's opaque, drawn shades one by one peel.
With prehensile fingers grip your enlightened quill,
Selene's pale orb with luminescent lines reel.
With gilded parasol twirl your flaming wheel,
Until enjoined sparks into tinted rays congeal.
In saffron waves, blanch horizon's, window seal.
On spindled beam, spin golden threads from creel,
Sheaves of golden flax span o'er ethereal hill.
Branching, with sonic beam pearly plains drill,
Until azure streams deep reservoir does fill.
With torch, burnt-orange meringue on puffy clouds spill,
then into earth's grainy purview with vigor steal.
With tempera, egg wash the Sky's blank stencil,
then with magnified lens illumine the scenic still.
Plunging downward, into denser troughs truncated waves swill.
Onto earth's jade footstool, solemnly kneel,
Drawing from vassal's, residual til.
Amber blades with brighter finish instill,
With waxy gloss the folio cover frill.
Categories:
tempera, beautiful,
Form: Rhyme
Lazy afternoons on easels
Maples giggle loud with sweetness
Blue and yellow mixed in grasses
Withered wrinkles sink in lilies
Joggers run in fear of dying
Secret trails end in abyss
As the sun stabs days in prisms
Bloody madness grabs the paintbrush
People old vanish from benches
Emptiness sits down by me
Artists mutilate self-portraits
Tempera in tubes succumbs
Painters shoot apocalypse in veins
Signatures escape through keyholes
Night becomes obsessive pitch black
Ghosts invade museum closed
...and I walk by with my suitcase
as reduced to it I am...
No one knows I carry homeless
The Portfolio of my Fate...
copyright@iolandascripca2012
Categories:
tempera, life, sad, giggle,
Form: Free verse
Faded tempera
Leonardo da Vinci
Jesus was betrayed
Categories:
tempera, art, mystery, religion,
Form: Haiku
Pacific murmur
Blond eyelids wake up seagulls
Happiness alive
Surf and rays in love
Paintbrushes escape from box
Immortality...
Tempera of Soul
Obsessive Golden Spectrum
Rip open my chest
Don' t need oxygen
Growing gills, play with dolphins
Sun alive again...
***for P.D.'s Contest " Sunrise"***
Categories:
tempera, life, nature,
Form: Haiku
If all I did was made you feel so real
Among aortas of much needed love
With silky shoulders of stern Pacific layers
Disturbed by memories of wings...
If I defected life and accepted wrinkles
Of heated rhythm in tempera of love
Although the shyness of a maiden wouldn't vanish
I long to get to know you in your destined life...
If all I did was made you stop and watch me
Smiling from a frame of wooden Jacaranda wonders
Then I can die forever in immortality of love -
The Anonymous -
in the "Wax Museum of
the Hoping Souls"...
Categories:
tempera, art, hope, imagination, love,
Form: Free verse
Pickled like gherkins in vinegar
Crystallised forever in sugar
Set and translucently Jellied ...
Hung like smoked, salted meat
Pigments crushed from earth
brushes from fine animal hair
Is it because they freeze
the sitter's image which
survived as the best image
of the sitter for millineums?
Linseed oil Egg tempera hand
mixed by devoted apprentices
Were paintings used for
communication to the viewer
Eyes moving behind the paintings..
before humans could read
or write?
To capture the likeness prior
the invention of photography?
Categories:
tempera, art, history, nostalgia, people,
Form: Verse