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