Mystical Pumpkins by Richard Peake

like the ripened bellies ______of expectant mothers pumpkins ready in the fields ______or at roadside stands round and ripe, pale or deep orange ______attract benign eyes innocent of leering faces ______so many will become as imaginations’ fantasies ______cut into art’s flesh creating a harvest birth ______miming nature’s fertility in efforts to shape images for witchery and spells making unreal things real, ______things Plato would decry, flesh obscuring an ideal form ineffable— yet pigs eat jack-o-lanterns so eagerly we must think them real and sculptors draw ideas from life ______so must defy philosophers who demand artists hew out arid ______ideas of reality denying the fertility of minds ______pregnant with sensuous words for magical pumpkin use ______that maker’s mind demands to celebrate life’s rebirth.

PREVIOUS TABLE OF CONTENTS NEXT Biography

Copyright © 2024 by Red River Review. First Rights Reserved. All other rights revert to the authors. No work may be reproduced or republished without the express written consent of the author.