Art – Poetry – Lisa Shea and Sarah Beth Guimond

For our 2018 Art & Poetry pairing, one pairing was with artist Lisa Shea and poet Sarah Beth Guimond.

Here are the works they created!

Lisa Shea provided this artwork to Sarah Beth:

In response, Sarah Beth wrote the following poem:

 

Indigo Escape

From the blurry depths of
dreamlike fog, beneath the water’s surface,
I can just make out the shape–
Like reading tea leaves in a cup,
Like twilight slowly enveloping the Earth.
I want nothing more than to be wrong about what I see.
Is this a chain to hold me?
Perhaps an anchor,
perhaps a snare?– or I pray, perhaps it is a buoy line that holds a boat nearby? That holds our escape
from our fears?
I want nothing more than your peace.

The second half of this pairing involved Sarah Beth giving Lisa a poem as a starting point. Sarah Beth provided this poem:

“You Devil
I never imagined hell,
I had no need to.

Told my mother the earth
I didn’t believe in that;

And she threatened to take
Heaven from me,
But I never believed I belonged there anyway.

It seemed too far away.
Too clean, too pristine
For the likes of me.

I think when
There is a frost I could
read all the names of the angels
In the language of nature.

There are thousands more than I know I’m sure, my heretic skin,
My heathen heart.
And there are two.

Two like the two shades of blue that your eyes are darker than most.

Two angels,
Like the children you have named,
Whose names I don’t know
Even though we say we are friends.

I almost named my child Gabriel you know, but then I didn’t.

I stayed up all night staring at a crack in the wall, a nameless child
resting in my womb, he was not worried that I had no name for him.
He was not in a hurry to leave and be born into the world like I was.

You Devil,
I imagine you know exactly what this Illusive heaven is like,
you were there once, and when I learned your name, my blood echoed through the coridoors
of my heart like a church bell.

Like a cup over filled,
spilling out like a smile, and laughter, oh, my heart–
You Devil
I ask not for it back.

Long ago eaten by wolves, not
The ones in my childhood that
Devoured innocence,
I would not give it to them.

I am red cloak. I am red cape. I am red dagger.
I am a vanishing act, but I always come back– or do I?”

In response, Lisa created this artwork:

2018 Art-Poetry Pairing main page