A pigeon daydreams
about poetry and ukiyo-e
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A pigeon daydreams about poetry and ukiyo-e*
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A pioneer-pigeon with clipped pinions;
in the sewer-street where tread heavy limits —
serve me crumbs while I serve a life sentence,
in the wild tameness I wax timid.
The adventurous life of the unwary
has become for me uncustomary;
for my days are soft-buoyed by habit,
reproducing the past as a rabbit
fast hedges her bets with the spring.
All my children: my days and their records
are scratched in weird surfaces, restless
to be willed and deciphered to words
by the irresolute and the feckless
transforming despair into joy.
My glaze-distant look is no ploy,
but a sign that my eyes have been seared
by the sun in the windows of prisons,
reflections of cars as they steered
and careened across spiraling visions
and cried over lies about time.
That recounting is best done in rhyme;
and in meter corr'sponding to mood
is advice to turn dollar from dime
and a counsel turns seed into food.
Thus I emulate writer whose face, now
is made brown, blue and red by the skylight
turned as jazz as New Oreleans acrylic
in my birdbrained imagining's nightlight
and if pigeon could ever turn poet
then might I, whose claws dream to grasp pencil
give order to ink and make flow it
over avian stamp and bone stencil.
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*Note for the reader (sourced from Wikipedia and modified)
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Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its creators produced woodblock prints and paintings using a precise multi-step process in which, generally — the artist designed the piece, a carpenter carved the woodblock, a printer inked and pressed the piece, and a publisher who financed and distributed the prints. The term 'ukiyo-e' (浮世絵) roughly translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".
The first image in this post was created by processing through a collage image
I created of two different ukiyo-e pieces as displayed directly below.
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Writing and images by Daniel Pendergraft
compiled for the Proof-of-Brain community on HIVE
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first published August 10th 2021
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Images created by processing public-domain
photographs with Deep Dream Generator.
