Poetry & Photography
It is so interesting to me how the arts overlap and inspire each other. I did a book project with a local poet and it was such a great experience that I wanted others to get in on the fun. So in January of 2020 I put together the first collaboration between the Welland Camera Club and the Canadian Authors Association. 4 local poets and 15 local photographers overlapping in a special way. Images inspired by written word, and poems inspired by images. Below are my contributions.
One Spring Sunday Afternoon
Image inspired by this poem from Andrew Lafleche
for his sagging peppered skin
and his stare ninety years
gone
this plain man’s defeated
demeanor could have been
misunderstood, unwarranted
or dismissed.
he sat stoic. his busied wife
shuffled about the room
fixing magazines
folding laundry
fingering buttons on her phone.
ninety years
in a world too cruel
even to permit him passage
at the end.
he caught my arm, squeezed
a desperate plea,
this man I would have forgot
if not for his whispered words:
“where I live,” he said. “we
take good care of the ladies.”
*First appeared in The Nashwaak Review, 2019.
Finding Alice
Poem by Tom Wood inspired by this Image
Call me Alice
although this is not my proper name,
I am a sentiment of gray
cast from blunted clouds,
a place where who I am
is less important than what I pretend to be.
I am the stuff of Alice
slung beyond the fringe of colour
a heap of powdered ash
dust from flames, dead
this translucent garment my only charge
against the teeth
that nibble
on my soft and honeyed flesh.
I am Alice
seeping through a dream
-your dream perhaps-
a pearl
plunking through the mirror,
a whim
you would have me be.