Isabella Latture – Inspired by 502 Lucerne Street by Edward Rice
The sun strikes down
on her frail skin,
on her head of short, gray hair.
She holds her cane
as tight as her aged knuckles can
and the arm of the creaking chair
she sits on in the other.
The grass is overgrown,
when was it last cut?
And the plants
they haven’t been trimmed.
The stems of the azaleas
brush her back as wind sweeps
through, and she bristles
at the gentle touch.
But she doesn’t stand. She
keeps her gaze trained bravely
on the nothingness ahead
of her. She stares it down, tells it
No, and the two stay
far away from each other.
But now it’s getting closer.
It’s inching forward, every
day.
I wrote this poem with the intention of explaining the artwork and the old woman’s internal monologue as she sat on her lawn, completely motionless. I wanted to freeze the moment in time and explore the relationship that I saw between the lawn and the old woman. The artwork, 502 Lucerne Street, made me feel like she was refusing to let it go and was almost guarding the area because of how serious her expression is in the painting. This opened my eyes to the way I interpreted it and wrote about it: since she seems so focused on something in front of her, and that something is never shown, I wanted to make it a subtle battle between someone at the end of their life, and death. I did not include details about the red house in the background because that was not the main focus of the painting, even though it physically took up a large part of it. As for the poem itself, I chose to break off many lines in the middle of sentences because I felt that it added dramatic flair to the lack of emotions in the painting and emphasized the finality of the comparison between life and death I was trying to draw.