By Martin Deveci
Your beauty compelled me to draw,
But I have never sketched before.
I was worried, didn’t know how to start
But drew the first line trusting my heart.
I began from your beautiful eyes
Who reveal your soul without any lies.
If I was to sketch the impossible
Then the rest would be just plausible.
Your portrait is complete and I’m thinking this is the end,
But why, the pencil is still in my hand…
I wasn’t prepared, and little did I know
Your soul was travelling through my core.
It has now reached my fingertips,
Kissing the charcoal like they were my lips.
It has transformed it to the diamond that I hold,
Your soul, is settled in this ring I’ve been told.
When the fist lockdown was announced in March 2020 I started going on walks in the local town park instead of the gym. I would go very early in the morning, always start and finish at the same location. This will usually take me on a journey of about 45 minutes of beautiful scenery. One such morning as I was approaching the finish line the following words popped into my head “Your beauty compelled me to draw, but I have never sketched before”. It didn’t stop there and the rest just followed. I felt the urge to rush back home and write down these words before I lost them. I was totally shocked, stopped at my starting/finishing spot and just wanted to comprehend what happened. As I was looking back at the park I noticed the rising sun and decided to take a picture. Went back home and couldn’t find a paper so wrote it down on the back of a chocolate pack. I called it The Sketcher’s Ring as it relates to my fists ever portrait drawing. Couple of days later while quietly drinking my tea I found myself in a similar situation and this time I called it March 2020.
What I find extraordinary and have no explanation for is how someone like me who never liked poetry, whose native language is not English ended up with two texts that one may call poems. I can’t help but think of the meaning of it all. Given the circumstance and how things developed I personally can’t separate them from each other. March 2020 describes how the whole world came to stand still with assurance that there is a hope and things will get back to normal. But if we wanted to build an even better future we should look up to women, whose ability to transform the world for the more beautiful one is described in the lines of The Sketcher’s Ring. This is my interpretation and I sure others will have their own.
Love this! And including your backstory makes the poem’s echo even stronger in my mind. Thanks for sharing.
*find those portraits etched* (please pardon my typo)
I got so much out of the explanation of the poem, it’s honor to women and the holding of the future. Thank you for putting that energy into this world, so dominates by the shadow yang energies. When I read this poem, my mind draws portraits of all the personalities lost to the virus, as well as to the other ways yang domination has taken lives, and I don’t those portraits etched into an eternal night sky.