Here is a work in progress, an “after” poem that originates from a prompt from Diane Seuss, chancellor at Academy of American Poets and also connects to a Kahlo painting. Get Seuss’s prompt dealing with a repeated word and advocating for lots of images—from the Academy’s Summer Series.
Heartbreak
—after Frida Kahlo’s Memory (Mexico) 1937
Heartbreak moves with no wind, little light, and not much life.
Heartbreak is a stiff dress on the clothesline, suspended in silence.
At onset, heartbreak feels like one foot on land, one in the sea,
Or heartbreak is like a body with missing parts.
It is heartbreaking to see love in ruins, bleeding out upon the ground.
People die of heartbreak every day, a real physical phenomenon.
A mother’s heart breaks many times before it breaks, another marvel.
Do you think heartbreak is all about the apple? When was heartbreak born?
And if God knows heartbreak, why is He silent when our heart breaks?
In heartbreak, night rules, and dawn becomes the miracle of all miracles.
Memory is heartbreak’s reservoir, its source of infection, its habitat for pain.
White-winged dove and mountain-mist are the colors of heartbreak.
Heartbreak is a joy-stopper, a faith-tester, a filcher of life, a thief.
Where do we go after heartbreak, after the chest has been impaled?
Where do we go after the long wait for transplant, organs failing with every breath?
After the young father gives the nod to the medical team? After a sister’s kiss
goodbye? Where do we go after the nurse adjusts the drips and the beeping
stops? After she straightens the sheets?
Note: Written during Ekphrastic Review’s third annual writing marathon; also inspired by the Seuss prompt above.