Morris Museum of Art Combining Voices Literary Competition
Combining Voices is a special literary competition sponsored by the Morris Museum of Art and designed for students in grades 4 through 12. After viewing and discussing five paintings in the museum’s permanent collection, Mrs. McGill’s eighth grade students wrote a poem or prose piece inspired by each of the paintings. Nicole A. earned an honorable mention in middle school poetry for her poem, Paths, inspired by Radcliffe Bailey’s untitled oil painting. Congratulations, Nicole!
Paths
by Nicole A.
My eyes open wide to see this strange new world.
The paths lay before me, but the direction is oblique.
A paddle points towards Saturn.
And beaming with light, a rocket promises to boost me upwards.
Up, up, up it seems to go, and leads me to Uranus.
But, Uranus contains my weakness of numbers, so why would I want to go there?
They call this mixed space my future, and in it is what my future will hold.
For it is a circle, and I am bound to experience it all until I obtain wrinkles, gray hair, and become old.
The paddle is now in my hands, and it is up to me to choose the starting direction.
I point it towards the tangled mess of Mars.
Confusing, complicated, and could be caustic.
But I choose to accept the challenge of future.
Choosing the starting path has become the past, the strange new world becomes the present, but the future still remains a mystery.
Artwork:
Radcliffe Bailey, Untitled, 2001. Oil on canvas. Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia. © Radcliffe Bailey
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