After “Electric Prisms” by Sonia Delauney
When after a heavy rain, nature’s prism refracts light,
juxtaposed colors seem to coexist peacefully within
an invisible threshold, the way an elderly couple stays
close while protecting unspoken boundaries.
The artist makes the rainbow swirl wild over the canvas
as a conductor raising his wand through colored patterns’
rhythms, creating occasional collisions. Broken dialogues
reveal angles replete with hidden whispers.
Rainbows form and disperse around the seated couple:
he listens to music while she daydreams hand resting
on a stack of old books. She caresses each spine trying
to remember a few opening lines.
When they break the silence, speech overlaps as they
change the subject and let it recur in circles. Sentences
run over a circumference then circle back around smaller
and smaller circles.
Back to the center of an unanswered question.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 6.
Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Press 53, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (2019), Tea in Heliopolis, and Under Brushstrokes. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A twenty one-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, and recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies.
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