Black Fire: A Poem on Confinement | Thursday Verse No. 21

  There is something unsettling about beauty viewed from a distance, how it can feel both comforting and unreachable at once. Written as a practice piece for a creative writing class on ekphrastic poetry, this poem grew out of my reflections on The Starry Night, and the strange stillness that exists beneath all its motion.

Black Fire

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889). Public domain image
via Wikimedia Commons / Google Art Project.

From the clutches of a cell on the mountain peak,

I watch the town slip into an oblivious sleep,

Yet only a few like me would hope on a brush capturing the night's scene,

to set myself into liberty.

On the murky blue shadows of my canvas,

I let the moon and stars dribble their yellows,

Just like the meek candle glinting and burning in the corner of the cell,

attempting to quell my sorrows.

The pleasantness of the gusty breeze,

Swirls and twirls into an insatiable desire to be set free,

So I cling steadily to the holy white spire, 

Pleading to be rescued from the dept of this deepest, bleakest, bluest mire,

Yet I slip into the throat of the bulging black fire.

- Mercy Rebonica