Dakota Duncan shares his poem inspired by the W.E.B. Starkweather painting at the Art of Poetry event on December 12, 2015 at Hickory Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Roger and Ginny Sanford.

Dakota J. Duncan
REFLECTION IN TIME OF STRESS AND SORROW
AT THE HICKORY MUSEUM OF ART
after “Late Afternoon Light” by William Edward Bloomfield Starkweather

And such is this sweet domesticity
Of oaken lanes and maple groves around:
Here remnants of magnolia on the streets,
There fragments of lost time and beauty found.

In Eden on a country road at dusk
Where all with breath and life sang praise to god,
When baptized in his sticky sweat and musk,
My aching spirit, bathed in sun, was thawed.

Across the road the weeping willow trees
Brush every clapboard face of his old House,
A palace once, now crumbling, tumbling down—
A vision of my perfect, ancient South.