COUP DE GRÂCE, AFTER BIERSTADT

Looking Down Yosemite Valley (1865) by Albert Bierstadt

COUP DE GRÂCE, AFTER BIERSTADT

When Bierstadt traversed the narrow ledge
up the granite wall, gaining momentum and altitude
with each labored step, in those golden morning hours,
with his sketch pad and pens in his rucksack,
or perhaps a small canvas strapped to a steady mule,
did he hesitate and bow to the sublime beauty
of The Sentinel, the grace of Cathedral Rock
or the sheer grandeur of El Capitán,
did his breath become an ablution
joining the collective prayers of dew and mist
rising from the meadow and river,
was he lulled by the cacophony of snowmelt,
and the silent song of samblind stars
before he rendered it all into artifice?
He was a long way from the Hudson River Valley
and those eastern sensibilities hellbent
on dividing and conquering the land in the name of God.
Did he ponder where to begin
with something so holy and profound,
or how to render that luminous landscape
wrought on such a massive scale, that it defied logic,
into something more civilized and tame,
all that Romanticism distilled
within the stifled confines of the painter’s studio?
Did he know the art salons would become billboards
of despair for the wild untrammeled vistas
when the thundering hordes headed west
to trample and love the sublime places to death?

1/11/2020
Ekphrastic poetry
Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center ChallengePrompt #28 (for January 11th, 2020)
The Peace of Wild Things— Read the poem by Wendell Berry.
Where do you find peace amid and/or because of wild things? Perhaps your poem about this will be an ode to a particular beach where the tides crash against boulders, or a sonnet
https://poets.org/glossary/sonnet
about a black phoebe on a backyard limb, or some other formal poem—a ghazal?—
https://poets.org/glossary/ghazal
about being stuck in freeway traffic and having the time to notice a delta of geese against the sunset.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry