September

He sits, stares at a single painting 

in the afternoon, rather abstract,

neo-abstract, perhaps neo-realist 

or post something, he doesn’t know

but it doesn’t matter, the painting

and its moment, the painting

in its moment is what matters

to him, speaks to him, he doesn’t

understand why but he’s beyond 

understanding, beyond veneration,

having arrived at veneration,

the painting is an icon, he thinks, 

the painting should be carried

properly by priests in cassocks

and belts of rope, priests

with long beards, as they carry

the icon flanked by acolytes

with candles down the steps

to Fifth Avenue and turn south. 

Painting: September, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This poem is a repost from Sept. 11, 2014.

September change

Standing in front

of the Metropolitan, next

to the street, he stares

as she disappears, enclosed

in yellow, surrounded

by the vaporous exhausts

of a hundred thousand sets

of moving parts, wheeling

forward, going somewhere,

leaving him standing, not

comprehending, daffodils

dropping singly from his hand

to his feet. He looks up

to the entrance

of the Metropolitan, back

from the street, and knows

he must sit in front

of one painting,

only one, the one called

September.

At dVerse Poets today, the poetics prompt is change. To see other poems submitted, please visit the site.

Painting: September, by Gerhard Richter (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Gerhard Richter's "September"

Everything that could be said today is being said today, and I won’t add words, or many of them.

In May, we were in the bookshop of the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago, and I found Robert Storr’s September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. I don’t agree with everything Storr, the dean of the School of Art at Yale University, has to say about 9/11 in the book -- too much of the East Coast liberal in him, and too much of the Midwest conservative in me. But I was taken with Richter’s painting. I had had a post over at High Calling Focus earlier this year about a Richter work at the St. Louis Art Museum, but I wasn’t aware of this work.

It’s small, approximately 20 by 30 inches. And while it doesn’t have the clarity of so many photographs, and the tragedy, horror and pain reflected on so many human faces that day, for me it represents much about what happened that day, what happened to all of us. 

Painting: September by Gerhard Richter (2005), The Museum of Modern Art, New York