Vox Populi
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Robbi Nester: Still Standing
After ‘Ivy and Winslow’ David Graeme Baker
At first glance, I think she is a teacher
drawing on the chalkboard. One finger
rests on the crevice where the chalk is kept.
The other arm sweeps wide, into an arc
on the board’s murky green surface,
where transparent moon-jellies swarm:
words poorly erased. She drafts a magic
circle to protect her. Yet her feet are bare,
standing in a pool of long-dried paint, as
in a spotlight. I decide this is an abandoned
school, site of a shooting, now her studio,
where she can drop the line of her imagination,
netting the unexpected, lost voices of a thousand
children and their teachers. She probes a past
she doesn’t really know, like a scientist who
studies creatures making their own cold light
in the deepest ocean, dreams and dreams again
about this ruined room, its light and shadows,
settled dust, compelled to paint it in bright hues,
to return and make this place a kind of shrine,
left standing to remind us all what has been lost.
~~~~
Robbi Nester is a poet, writer, and retired educator. She is the author of four books of poetry—a chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections—A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019).
Poem copyright 2025 Robbi Nester
Painting: Ivy and Winslow by David Graeme Baker, oil on linen mounted on panel, 20×32″
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Good morning, Michael. Here in a quiet space, I’ve returned to this poem and read it aloud, letting its beauty and depth cast a spell. Thanks so much for posting it. I’ve a notion to send the poem to a team of teachers I’ll be working with in March. So many of them, I think, will find themselves dwelling in the lines of the poem.
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Thank you, Luray. I love this poem as well. Please do send it to teachers who may find it as moving as you and I did.
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A fine and beautifully imaginative ekphrastic poem.
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Yes, a meditation not only on the painting, but also the tragedies that have happened in schoolrooms.
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Thank you for this blue and moody ekphrastic poem, which matches so well the mood of the painting and the world (sitting on the floor near her feet).
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Beauty and fear in the same classroom… what a world we live in.
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What a moving poem. This blends inner space of the poet and the outer world of a work of art so seamlessly.
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I agree, Bonnie. Thank you!
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Oooh! others have gestured to some of my favorite lines here, so I will just say: how very lovely, Robbi! The details are marvelous, and even though an ekphrastic piece “wants” the image that inspired it, I think the poem would work even if we couldn’t see the Baker painting. (I extra-love the fact that Baker’s painting’s title alludes to yet another artist focused on the marine world!)
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Thanks, Annie!
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“Drop a line of her imagination” I was pulled in so perfectly, I didn’t realize it until I was there.
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yes, I like the clarity and subtle strategy of this poem.
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Beautiful ekphrastic!~. I love the palimpsest of erased words as “moon-jellies,” and the magic circle you see she has drafted, perhaps to protect herself from the violence that happened here. This is wonderfully imagined and made sadly contemporary with the school shooting.
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‘School shooting’: what a tragedy that the phrase has become necessary.
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Love, LOVED this. “She probes a past / she doesn’t really know, like a scientist who / studies creatures making their own cold light / in the deepest ocean…”
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I love those lines as well, Rose Mary. Thank you!
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Such a perfect ekphrastic poem — & what a superb painting to be inspired by!
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I love the painting, as well as the poem inspired by it!
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