Midsummer twilight, meadow a flood of Love-in-a Mist, also called Devil-in-a-Bush—delicate blue blooms, lacy leaves fine-cut as fennel, seed pods striped and horned. Ten women in fluid, gauzy azure gowns beneath a steel-blue sky arrange garlands in their hair, join hands in ecstatic dance, heads flung back, long hair waterfalling.

On his evening stroll, a man in a blue-gray fedora hears singing, heads its way. When he reaches the women, their song and dance accelerate in intensity. He’d like to run away, but he increases his pace, lowers his head as if to study the beauty at his feet. He wants no part of the shenanigans. When someone releases an elated whoop, he ducks as if a banshee might hurl herself on him.

—Inspired by Maximilian Lenz, Eine Welt (One World):

Publisher’s Note:

Eine Welt (One World) (oil on canvas, 1899) by Austrian painter, graphic artist, and sculptor Maximilian Lenz (1860-1948) resides at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. See photograph of framed painting shot at the museum by the late Hungarian art restorer Nori (Nóra Mészöly):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nora-meszoly/6871909951

Details about the artist are available at Mahler Foundation:
https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/contemporaries/maximilian-lenz/

Both links above were retrieved on 9 May 2022.

Karen George

is the author of five chapbooks, and three collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, The Ekphrastic Review, I-70 Review, The Indianapolis Review, Juniper, Poet Lore, Naugatuck River Review, Salamander, and Valparaiso Poetry Review; as well as in Slippery Elm as winner of their 2022 poetry contest.

Her poetry reviews appear in Poetry Matters.

Author’s website: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Emily Carr: Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1932–35), poem by Karen George in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 6, January 2021)