An ekphrastic poem inspired by the oil painting, PEACE IN UNION, by artist, Thomas Nast, 1895

Image of Winslow Homer’s The Surgeon at Work at the Rear during an Engagement, from Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1862, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

The incivility,

the cleaving,

the grotesqueness of an electric-chair sky,

heads, necks, fingers,

falling to fury,

 a nation of lost statues

and amnesiac stars,

tumbling into the forgetting,

sleeping beneath an overpass

in an overcrowded city.

Even with a resolution

we are still severed;

the media doctors divide

our flesh into blue and red,

use polls like weapons,

alter the history of the heart,

incite trauma, replicate pain

across sad centuries,

a gangrenous legacy,

a night weeping on fields.

Knees, wrists, throats,

intergenerational cellblocks,

the fatalities of grief,

ballads of discordant verse,

drifting as wounded clouds

above an anxious nation:

on edge

and wary,

like a compelled handshake

between enemy generals.

This poem was selected by a jury to be included in the 2022 Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Festival in Friendswood, Texas. The poem was inspired by Thomas Nast’s 1895 oil painting, Peace in Union, which depicts Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. The image on this page is that of the artwork of Winslow Homer which is displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and is made available via Smithsonian Open Access.

Thomas Nast’s original oil painting, Peace in Union, is displayed at the Galena & U.S. Grant Museum in the town of Galena, Illinois. The precision of detail and the range of facial expressions captured by Thomas Nast in his work, reflect the tension and emotion of that moment in the history of the Republic.

An ekphrastic poem, Copyright © 2022 Donna Kathryn Kelly