Perseus and Andromeda
Nude
in chains
on the rocks
she’s picture-perfect.
Titian’s Andromeda displayed
for us mortals, for hungry beasts, and for Perseus
who dives seaward dressed-to-kill in pink and gold robes to slaughter the slavering monster.
He’s a boy-hero, pointing his scimitar, playing the man-of-action awed by the glamour of a damsel’s distress – he needs to impress.
Her life depends on this handsome man so she exhibits herself in a table-dance
wearing fettish limb-fetters and a dangling earring
she guarantees love at first sight.
In moments of stress
decorum
learns how
to
flirt.
Colin Bell 29/9/2020
I was inspired by the much-praised Titian exhibition, Love Death and Desire, at London’s National Gallery this summer, during the infamous Covid-19 pandemic – so much so that I decided to write a set of Fibonacci poems about them. Poetry based on specific works of art are known as Ekphrastic – my four new poems, Four Ekphrastic Fibs are the result and they have just been published in The Fib Review, that impressive Fibonacci specialist journal. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/
I thought I would reproduce them here along with the original paintings by Titian, maybe the greatest painter of the nude, known appropriately enough as the Poesie – or Poems. If you want to know more about these paintings read about them on my previous blog Titian Reunited: https://www.wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19989
My four new Titian poems join a fifth, Diana and Actaeon, that was already published in a previous issue of the Fib Review in a set of poems inspired, like all of these paintings, by stories from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I have printed it again here below.
I write these poems using the Fibonacci mathematical number sequence for each line’s syllable count….and now having had 104 of them published by The Fib Review, I guess you could say that I’m hooked as you will probably see if you look back on some of my previous blogs on the subject of Fibonacci and the Fib. https://www.wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19
My thanks, yet again, to The Fib Review for continuing to publish my work.
Venus and Adonis
Stay
moans
Venus
love’s goddess
Titian’s writhing nude.
Adonis springs hot from her bed
his blushes define the child out-grown by his body.
He is dressed for hunting, she’s undressed for him, helpless love personified by its queen
who is now tasting the pain she inflicts on us all.
His dogs salivate sensing blood,
the boy is confused:
why this fuss?
Venus sees
the death
of
youth.
Colin Bell 29/9/2020
Diana and Callisto
Chaste
queens
turn mean
at bath time
in Titian’s paintings –
he likes women out of their clothes.
Virgin goddess Diana is nasty when she’s nude
she’s addicted to alfresco ablutions in the woods with her handmaidens naked.
Useful for Titian but bad for the nymph Callisto
pregnant by the king of the gods
strip-searched found guilty
shaming us
who stand
and
stare.
Colin Bell 30/9/2020
Actaeon
Don’t
look,
he thought,
but he did,
fearing what he saw,
alert to the change in himself.
Until now he’d been just a lad hunting with hound dogs.
Eyes know your desires before you do, he discovered in that surprised unblinking glance.
Arousal felt bestial to this embarrassed young man.
The transformation was instant
and the first horn grew.
Love’s not blind,
he thought,
for
stags.
Colin Bell 05/10/2017