Dear Hung Liu (photos)

Dear Hung Liu,
First travel plans since sequestration, I’m wandering through the Oakland Airport with time to kill. So much has changed, I hardly recognize anything. It’s like being on another planet. Since I had time to kill, I wandered down the terminals, and when I saw your wall of dancing cranes, I wanted to weep. The hairs on my arms stood on end. Something familiar at last. Since you painted those endangered cranes, the population has plummeted. But they tenaciously cling to the tree of the species still with us. So much water under the bridge since I last saw you at your and Annie Leibovitz’s exhibit in San Jose. But here you are, again, through your art, and as I sit in the cathedral of cranes, I am grateful for your vision, never dreaming it would offer solace so many decades later. And by wandering off, by getting lost, I was found again. Sheh-sheh.

Meeting Annie Leibovitz

“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” – Annie Leibovitz

Don't I know about that one. Bearing witness, so intimate, yet, one is removed from the event. Sometimes the camera renders one invisible. I met Annie once at a museum opening of her work, and the work of Hung Liu. Larger than life, Annie was hardly invisible! I was pretty chuffed, I even have a photo of her. But it's out of focus, as if the lens couldn't take all of her in.

POCAHONTAS

from Pocahontas, by Annie Leibovitz

Running with deer, she leads,

the barefoot girl dressed in deer skins,

races along the cliff's edge,

the doe dutifully follows at a half gallop

scuffing autumn leaves like a child.

Soon it will be time to gather maple sap.

Intent on something at the edge of the woods,

she does not notice a masted ship laying

fallow in the glassy bay, sails pulled in,

or the gathering storm and the nervous flight of birds

Beneath her feet, the sedges weave themselves

into a weir of conquest and entrapment.

Ekphrastic poem. According to John Drury's The Poetry Dictionary, ekphrastic poetry is "Poetry that imitates, describes, critiques, dramatizes, reflects upon, or otherwise responds to a work of nonliterary art, especially the visual." So, I've provided links to two pieces of art, and I want you to pick one (or both) to write an ekphrastic poem. (It would be helpful for you to mention which art you picked.)

1. Pocahontas, by Annie Leibovitz
2. Flight of the Witches, by Francisco de Goya