Humming - deCordova series

Humming
Jaume Plensa
2011
marble and lead

I close my eyes, grit my teeth.
The camel shifts through sands beneath

Its feet.  Is there a better way
To travel without lurch and sway?

Step, scrunch. I hum a tune,
Conjure genie from the dune.

I command thee! Help me fly
A magic carpet through the sky.

Sailing, soaring, smooth and free.
Ouch! The camel’s flea bit me.

* * *

Welcome to my fifth – and final – post inspired by artwork at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA.  What a joy it has been to have these incredible works jumpstart my writing brain!

You may recognize Jaume Plensa as the artist behind The Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park or Echo in New York’s Madison Square Park.  The deCordova recently acquired this marble piece entitled Humming, an elongated female head in solitary meditation.

I was envious of this calm, slightly exotic woman, so cool and collected on a hot July day.  Our contemplative peace was suddenly shattered by the piercing shrieks of a squirming toddler, lugged across the lawn by his beleaguered mother and stuffed unceremoniously back into the stroller from which he had escaped.  In my poem the lines blurred - did the camel represent his stroller?  Was the  child the dreamer, or the flea?  Nonetheless, I silently wished his mother the sense of serenity reflected on the sculpture’s face.

I felt Humming would be a nice companion to Listening Stone, my first post in the series.  Male or female, eyes open or shut, rough stone or polished granite, who knows what we will hear when we truly listen?

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