Never worn, just hanging
there,
eyeless and mouth
agape,
an emptiness that
speaks
volumes of historical festivity
and plague,
the drunken pox, depravity,
appetites and folly
of the age.
Kim M. Russell, 12th October 2020
My response to earthweal weekly challenge: Earth-Masks
Brendan has given us a detailed background to this week’s theme: masks, something we wear now as a matter of protection, although they have become something of a fashion statement for some people. The masks we wear to go shopping or visit the doctor are nothing like the ones in museums or the ones we wear at Halloween – although, we haven’t experienced Halloween during a pandemic before.
For this week’s earthweal challenge, we are taking up masks: tribal or mythic, literary or psychological. We can assume the persona of a ghost or ancestor, a sea-beast or an eagle. We can explore what masks empower us to say and sing and how different the world is when viewed through the mask. Do masks allow us to enter collective or personal cellars or sidhes or spookhouses it would be devastating to do otherwise? How do our voices change? What happens to language devices like music, metaphor, meaning, rhyme? Do masks allow a bridge from human to nonhuman earth? Do new imagined futures emerge from their oracles?
writing in north norfolk 
That silent gaping maw corresponds with the howl I feel rising up from deep within me some days now.
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Me too at the moment, Suzanne. I look at that mask every day and it reflects so many of my own emotions
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Let out the howl and get a new mask 😀
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All of those things from a voiceless, faceless mask: echoes of history, tradition and even pandemic.
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Thank you, Ingrid.
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Good one, Kim. The mask’s eyes remind me of the dead hollow eyes of the soulless people doing so much damage these days………
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Thank you, Sherry. So many people with masks and soulless eyes.
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Like Munch’s scream, no words are needed. (K)
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Masks are more expressive than they seem at first.
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A great reminder that masks are caricatures of an excess; we are indeed condemned by them. Foolery and tragedy do go hand in hand, mask to mask … Brendan
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