Ekphrastic Poetry of John F. Keane

 

John F Keane is a software developer and technical author who currently resides in Manchester, in the UK. He won Bolton Station’s Community Partnership poetry contest in 2020, the Bread and Roses Poetry Award in 2024 and the King’s English Society poetry competition in 2025. He has also published poems in many international publications, including the speculative fiction magazine Analog and Jubilat, the University of Massachusetts's literary journal. He also won Top Honours in the 2021 Ekphrastic Poetry Contest sponsored by the Friendswood Public Library, Texas.

 

 

 

Ekphrastic Rhapsody on Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock

 

Canvas to him became a silent plain

for new creation ready, whereon

a skein thin black of lines first

cast, a motion of limb and foot

and whole body, a fall that broke

the static silence, grace of gravity's pull.

 

From every side a spill of shadow

to thin-liquid form, a web of darkness woven.

Then other colours came, a fall of hues,

a brown of earth, a white of bone

and teal-storm spots, spilling moods

 

each moment.

 

Each pour, each drip, each spatter-flung

a fractal of vision, the dance

its own becoming. The patterns' truth

a geometry living, to nature's work so near;

shorelines and tree limbs, and lightning’s

dart, in kindred form revealed.

 

What of this art whose life of paint,

its own creation's echo, finds itself?

 

 

Ekphrastic Meditation on Confederate Autumn by Dale Gallon

 

These last cavaliers hail

the blaze of summer’s ending,

a pistol-warm sundown

fraught with fatal shadows.

They ride into the final act,

each beat of hoof a tolling bell

for a war already lost.

 

They see it in the fields dying,

in the tired eyes of comrades,

a truth colder than the coming winter.

 

October blows with Jericho-might

upon a dwindling cause.

Crossed bars with battle honours

whip ragged as the clouds,

recalling glories fading.

 

The wind whispers of Appomattox

but they hold fast to the saddle,

to this last, abiding moment

of desperate renown.

 

 

Ekphrastic Meditation on the Confederate Sharpshooter at Devil’s Den

 

Laid out in woundless

beauty, ever young

an epic, nameless figure

 

some great knowing

veils his silent face

adrift in pure unseeing

 

inside a plunging

moment, ever there.

 

As Earth’s face turned

cool starlight bathed him

felled among boulders

named for a serpent

 

what world his, what

mysteries he knew

paused in eternity

 

his dropped musket

propped behind

to frame a narrative

 

Southern Leonidas

escaping history

as he becomes it

 

the scission

of a nation, snared

in light.