Poet Steve Klepetar Reimagines Prosperine, Ophelia, and a Scapegoat

Back by popular demand is poet-professor Steve Klepetar. His work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including three in 2014. His most recent collection is an e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, from Kind of a Hurricane Press. Klepetar teaches English literature at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. Read more on his website here. 

Proserpine

After the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874

She holds the pomegranate with its bloody

gash, forbidden seeds ripped from flesh.

Fingers drape her painful wrist, as if covering

a racing pulse, or a slash, or a lover’s playful

bite. She is no springtime goddess, snatched

from gathering flowers on some green hill,

but a queen robed in the colors of night,

a crow’s blue-black sheen. Her lips bleed,

her hair floats as a dark cloud, her hooded

eyes betray no hope of return as they stare

down toward the dark rivers flowing to a

nether sea where all boats must come to rest.

Ophelia

After the painting by John Everett Millais, 1851-1852

Springtime, and the Rose of Shannon blooms,

Dragon’s Tongue reeds jab warming air.

They rise from a narrow brook, tangle of brush

and watery moss, a thick and growing tomb.

Her heavy dress pulls her body down

toward river muck. On the surface, her face floats,

another petal torn from a flowering bush.

She has dragged herself to this place of sacrifice.

Naiads weep, all their mournful singing stopped.

Frogs linger in shadows, holding their green tongues.

Flowers perfume humid air, but the birds are still.

The Priests have retreated, with their hoods and flame.

Wade into the stream, bend and kiss her brow.

She will waken, her hands open, to greet you at water’s edge.

The Scapegoat

After the paining by William Holman Hunt, 1854

She stands in a desert of ice by a blue-green

lake, beneath a range of mountains, violet

in the thin light of winter afternoon. When

she moves, her hooves crack through to

water cold enough to make her voice break

in this silent, empty place. She carries the red

sins of a tribe that shivers in the distance, out

of sight, with provisions running low. Their

children have grown thin with want, the hunters

return with nothing. All the bones picked clean

and grim night comes on. The goat’s eyes 
burn,

wild with a knowledge torn from dead sky.

painters and poets ekphrastic poems