A poem for Jean Sbarra Jones’s Dress in Water Series

Poetry & Art Leave a comment

Writer Nikita Deshpande saw Jean Sbarra Jones’s Dress in Water series and was inspired to write a poem. Enjoy!

Text of poem image: In America, I Met A Woman Who Paints Dresses Floating on Water by Nikita Deshpande — After the paintings of Jean Sbarra Jones When you come from a country of extremes— furnace of heat and dust or rain that paints whole towns in blurred watercolors — when you come from a country like that you rarely take anything for granted, not warmth, nor cold, never comfort. So believe me when I say I was baffled. Baffled at a country that serves four kinds of bread at breakfast and two fruit pies at dinner, baffled at soda fountains and bottomless coffee jars, at the size of sandwiches and the amount of sugar in everything. But mostly baffled at the sight of the dresses floating on lakes, ponds and puddles, bereft of their wearers. Canvas after canvas of satin and silk soaked under the weight of the world, it would seem. There’s a dress the color of emeralds bumping against lilypads in the marsh. Another — blue — reflecting some gone heaven, some idyll stained from cornflowers and butterfly-pea, a sky we forfeited when paradise was lost. And another, red, as anger, first blood, as cherries picked just before an Indian monsoon, as the blush on the skins of overripe peaches. And I’d stare and tilt my head and smile, say softly, “I don’t understand art”, when knowing tugged at the hem of my being to ask the vital question girls carry into the water in India, America, everywhere: Was this dress ripped off or shed? Shall I feel joy? Or pain or fear or loss? Or relief for a woman who has pushed off from the riverbank with purpose and wants to be swept up in a current, or something bigger than herself.

Check out more of Nikita Deshpande’s work on her website: https://www.nikitadeshpande.org

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