“Prudence Pauses” by Warren Meredith Harris

Albert Pinkham Ryder, A Country Girl, 1903, oil on canvas. Purchase made possible by the Fine Arts Fund, 1947. Collection of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, founded as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

after A Country Girl by Albert P. Ryder

The strong August wind
is bending the rounded top
of that knobby tree.
Plain-faced? So you may be.
So what? Rest your walking stick

against the tree’s trunk,
feel the grass between your toes,
lean your back, arch it
into the wind, your shoulders into
the cooling wind. Part your feet,

catch the soothing wind,
legs bent, spread, skirt-bound.
Ride, ride the unexpected wind.
Listen, above the wind, for the scratch
of graphite in my racing hand.

You can read more of Warren’s recent ekphrastic poems — suggested by four different Marc Chagall paintings — at http://www.paintersandpoets.com/2015/03/warren-meredith-harris-meets-marc.html and at http://jewishliteraryjournal.com/poetry/the-players/. His collection of largely narrative pieces, The Night Ballerina: A Poem Sequence in Seven Parts, was published by BrickHouse Books in 2012.