Recent Acquisitions

 

I go slowly through the Museum

of Photographic Art. The exhibits

come forward or recede, according 

to my attention, seeming to demand 

a backdrop of music. They’re art, aren’t they, 

even if not made with paint. There swells

then, loud in my secret hearing,

Don McLean singing Vincent. 

A red feather bursts from a swirl of blue.

‘A colourful life’ says a collective label.

Transparency is vivid, shaping an eye

startlingly bright. Vincent’s coruscating stars 

erupt in the night sky, as the song rises, 

forms in space and falls, splashing 

all the walls, filling the high corners. 

‘Hocus pocus,’ the sign says. ‘Picture this.’

 

Voice and words turn sad. I arrive 

at Nagasaki and documents of conflict:

the photograph as witness. Facing the past,

the artist speaks. I look at all the  portraits 

of dead people, whose eyes gaze back, alive. 

And at the graves, the bodies, the ruined 

landscapes. It’s all storyteller work. (Think: 

‘Vincent didn’t know the half of it.’)

‘Perhaps they’ll listen now,’

Don finishes the song. But I don’t know.

People are still cruel. (I myself

kill certain insects.) But in spite

of horror, in spite of melancholy,

it’s good to take a pause, focus, capture 

the unnoticed: feathers, the whirling of stars. 

The sign says, ‘Pay what you wish.’

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Sixteen. We are invited to superimpose a piece of music on a place; also we might take inspiration from exhibits (online) in the Museum of  Photographic Art in San Diego. Additionally, I've chosen to make mine partly a found poem, by incorporating the following words and phrases found in various labels there (not necessarily where I've assigned them in the poem):

recent acquisitions 

red feather

a colourful life

transparency

forms in space 

hocus hocus 

picture this

documents of conflict

the photograph as witness

facing the past

the artist speaks

storyteller work

take a pause
focus 

capture the unnoticed 

pay what you wish