like
a rock
crushing your soul

from
a place
beyond the sky

and
what no
one will tell

spoken,
distilled into
a symbolic language

but
what of
after?  what of

the
cosmos surrounded
by the abyss—

My poem, “The Same Old Song”, is among the writing posted today at The Ekphrastic Review in response to Mariano Fortuny’s painting “Fantasy on Faust”, above.

The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a hay(na)ku, which consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two words, and the third line has three words.  I decided to take my poem and condense each stanza creating a new distilled version.  The formatting did not translate to the posting on the Ekphrastic Review website, but I think you can see where the stanza breaks should be.  Read the original poem here.

This was an excellent exercise for someone like…