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POETRY PAGE

The Hope Lives: Art for ALS - Research Renderings Wine Tasting & Ekphrastic Poetry event was Sunday, May 18th at the San Francisco Women Artists Gallery. Please help me in thanking our sponsors for this event: SFWA Gallery, Corner 103 Tasting Room, ALS TDI and International Encaustic Artists

 

Guest Poets: Dean Rader, Angelica Recierdo, Sarah Rosenthal, Kim Shuck and Rebekah Wolman shared their beautifully penned poetry. On this page you can enjoy time reading the poems alongside the artwork that inspired it.

Cellular Study No. 2 by Caryl St. Ama

THE EARTH IS BODIES. BODIES ARE MORTAL. THE EARTH IS MORTAL:

Dean Rader

ϕ the dots [like blue Pollack]

ϕ the mitochondria again

ϕ the rivers [red] 

ϕ the body

ϕ nothing redacted

ϕ the needle

ϕ the landscape [lunar]

ϕ line four of this poem

ϕ the excitotoxicity

ϕ art picks up where nature ends [Chagall]

ϕ the sky in reverse

ϕ the endoplasmic reticulum

ϕ the poem I meant to write

ϕ the little craters [like melanoma]

ϕ the machine, the lines, the beeping [endless]

ϕ the body

ϕ the cellular sinescence [strocytes] [glial]

ϕ what I wanted to say

ϕ the white field [Ryman]

ϕ where in the blur your eyes go 

ϕ where death sleeps like a black fish on the bottom of the sea

ϕ the axonal transport defects

ϕ a whisper, a wave crash, a fire beneath moon wash

ϕ what this poem should be doing

ϕ the purpose of art [washing the dust of daily life off our souls] [Picasso]

ϕ the empty bed

ϕ oligodendrocyte impairment

ϕ the poem as a failed attempt at the impossible

ϕ the opposite of solace

ϕ the body

ϕ my body

ϕ the peace that passeth

ϕ a cello, a swallow, a ray of light

ϕ once upon a time

ϕ a hand upon an arm, a hand upon a chest, a hand 

ϕ infinite music, endless light, unending canvas

ϕ the peace, the body, the poem, the empty bed

An Interrupted Dance by Regina B. Quinn

Inflamed in Reverie
By Angelica Recierdo 

 

Left with my own brain
             and some mistaken river,
pockmarked stems

                      grace a bed of dissonance.

I want to leave beloved before my own music
plays to unsung feet.

And so we marvel at the buds,
love them only on the day before spoil,
when time is kind and encaustic.

 

Dry day of no sinking chair
and full stunning, partnered sense.

Take me to the bench at the end of the banks
where magnolias inflame in reverie.

After “An Interrupted Dance” by Regina Quinn

Extinguish by Joan Stolpen

Extinguish

Written in response to Extinguish by Joan Stolpen (encaustic on panel)
 

​​

Is heaven a place

is the place a

painting if a place

does it hold only

the lovely if edges

dissolve is that lovely

or excruciating is there

anything lovely about a 

persistent ache if the

ache permeates the painting 

does it enter the 

beholder’s eye is this

solace

 

Is heaven the hours

you spend applying color

to a panel do

color and form speak

of heaven is heaven

the same as sky

is sky in the 

beholder’s eye is ocean

is chemise pebble fog

gold filagree is it 

firmament a place if 

not where did she 

go

 

If a photo is

imperceptible in a painting

is it there or

missing like a person

is it hiding like

a private ache or

hide and seek did

the process of making

reveal the image didn’t

serve or served as 

impetus only to be 

covered by pastel and

molten wax

 

Does the beholder’s eye

open to befriend the

painting does the painting

do the befriending is

trust built a conversation

extended an ache revealed

by blue of wild

iris gold of finest

filigree slate and rust

fog grey here yet

dissolving in endless mourning

can this conversation provide

solace

 

How are we marked

by missing what marks

do we make in

our missing how does 

missing manifest in the 

marks how does making 

them reveal how amplify

our missing is it

ours or is it

ocean we enter pebble

we pick up chemise 

we don fog opening

to sky

In the Tangle of a Human Body

A poem by Kim Shuck

 

In the body of my friend

Brambles of neurons

Catch and

Go silent 

Heft of cell the

Corona of 

Dendrites spread like fingers

Like the arms of sun stars these

Long and reaching cells

Elegant and

Poised until they

Wither in 

Stained slides in

Microphotographs

As the habit of  

Communication 

Built over decades is

Dismantled a

Strange and 

Unfamiliar beauty

Sings self

ALS Research photographs for
artistic inspired creations in the exhibition 

Message System by Roxane Mayeur

Organic
 


Form ever follows function.
That was Louis Sullivan
"father of the skyscraper"
on its evolution.
For Charles Darwin,
evolution's father,
function followed form
as new improvisations on
the theme of beak and blossom
competed to survive.


In this painting with the reaching
and the diving,
branch tips striving,
taproot divining,
sky reflecting water, water sky,
if form follows function
the need to connect
sends tentacles stretching.
If the reverse, the tentacles dance
to discover themselves
a system for sending
essential messages across
the gaps at crucial junctions
along a path.



 

 

Say form stalks function.
Say form and function flirt and fall
in love, become like partners
on a dance floor so well in synch
that following and being followed
are illusions.
Say then they stumble
from exhaustion.
Say function wears form out.
Form frays, abandons function.
Each one's betrayed.
Each leaves the other haunted.
There is no formula then
for their flailing, for their failing.
There is no formula for their falling out.

—after "Message System," encaustic and pigments on mulberry paper, by Roxane Mayeur

Rebekah Wolman, May 2025

Along a path 
I count a dozen different grasses,
each releasing seeds from
different forms of bell and tassel
on their stalks.

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