Thomas Festa

Diptych

The first time I traveled by myself to another country, I flew to London on a small grant, stayed in Bloomsbury near the British Museum, spent ten hours a day researching God knows what in a reading room at the British Library. Except for the day I went walking and ended up at the National Gallery, a free and glorious thing—and found myself staring until closing at the Wilton Diptych. Back home, my son was not yet two. This was the first time I’d left him for more than a few hours. As I sat with that blue in foreign anonymity, the symmetries rang out—all those angels’ wings, roses, toadstools, ferns, and gold, saints, harts, martyrs, kings to be deposed.  

newborn eyelid
the hinge in the middle
of everything

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Note: To see the painting referenced in the haibun click here. 

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About the Author

Thomas Festa is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and the author of a chapbook of poems, Earthen (Finishing Line Press). Other work includes an ecopoetic reading of W.S. Merwin’s late poetry (in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and poems in Bennington Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, and Haiku Journal.

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