Unfinished Portrait

The canvas cannot capture me.
I'll rise before the painting dries.

No photograph snaps fast enough
to picture me beyond
a blur.

My life shall not be
paused like film:
constrained,
one image

stilled in frame,

too
closely
cropped

and stopped midway

between the person
I once was
and everything
I must become.

This also goes for verse or prose:
all epics are inadequate.
Biography's just summary,
abbreviated history,
superficial, incomplete.

What does come close to showing me?
Unfinished art, a symphony
whose restless music never ends
but scales outside the printed score.

Refuse to be diminished, friends!
No one was small! We're so much more!




Unfinished Portrait © Copyright 2021, Robert J. Tiess.

View this poem at AllPoetry.com

107 words.  Image (face, partial painting) inspiration challenge prompt - link: https://allpoetry.com/contest/2797125-Write-to-Image---8-Only-
Submitted: January 13, 2022









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