The Poetry Stash: 14Mar2024

Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and Pomegranate by Linda Pastan

Today’s poem is “Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and Pomegranate” by Linda Pastan from the collection Carnival Evening, New and Selected Poems 1968 – 1998. The book is available for purchase here.

Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and Pomegranate by Linda Pastan

To lift himself from one of his depressions,
my father took up painting, oil on canvas
for which he had no teacher,
just an apprenticeship in free will
and bagfulls of groceries to practice on.

I can still smell those apples, and sometimes peaches,
going slyly to rot on my mother’s velvet shawl
whose blue folds he slowly re-created
one by one by one as if they were waves
on an artificial ocean.

Courbet’s fruit have so much roundness,
such warmth and homeliness beside the pewter tankard,
you could almost say they had humanity,
if apples could be human.
And I stand in this crowded museum,

all these years after my father’s death,
they make me grieve for him
and his precise, mistaken apples,
not for his failures;
for how stubbornly he tried.

Prompts:

1.	Begin with “I can still smell…”
2.	Begin with “you could almost say they had humanity…”
3.	This poem is an example of ekphrasis poetry. To learn more about ekphrasis, click here. Write your own ekphrasis poem.
4.	Draft a poem prompted by a memory of a family member.

5. Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate, Artist: Gustave Courbet, Oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London. Use this image as a writing prompt.

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