no longer drifting

sculpted by salty waves and sand
the driftwood was almost        out        of        reach
on the dunes above the beach
thrown high in a storm

it had once been part of a living tree
torn from its

roots

and manufactured into something practical
like a boat or a table

by the time it reached the shore
it was unrecognisable
twisted by the artifice of the ocean into something more
than a piece of        drift        wood
enticing to a collector 
of flotsam        jetsam        shells        pebbles
a creator of ocean art

in it she sees her own inquisitive eyes
retroussé nose
curve of lips
it’s almost carved into an autobiographical bust
with slanted shoulders from leaning
over clay        wood        marble        stone

and she can’t wait to get it home

Kim M. Russell, 15th April 2025
Image by Lesly Derksen on Unsplash

It’s Tuesday again – doesn’t it go round fast? – and at the dVerse Poets Pub it’s Poetics with Lisa, who appears to have been busted!

Lisa tells us that every Tuesday she meets up with her family at Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. From the way she describes it, it sounds like a place I’d live to visit. She also describes a new exhibit, ‘Busted: Contemporary Sculpture Busts’, which opened last week.

Lisa says that being geeked with the busts made out of so many materials, in so many styles, with so many ways of communicating “issues tied to identity, mortality, power, and history,” she thought it would make a wonderful prompt and, searching through the dVerse archives, she found a prompt by Victoria C. Slotto from 2012, titled ‘Sculpting a Poem’, which we should read her prompt for guidance.

26 thoughts on “no longer drifting”

  5. Excellent work. I like how nature has sculpted the drift wood into something more, unrecognizable, yet the sculptor sees herself within it and plans to take it and the drift wood will once again be sculpted, this time by human hands, into art.

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  11. Is there anything more delightful than the rare find of something this uniquely beautiful (as you have described) in your lovely poem, Kim? Nope, at least not on this fine day.

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