A Bride Dressed in White
She wasn’t innocent this wife to be
Though she was dressed in white
Pale as a moonlit night
She said her silent prayers
To whom one can only guess
This woman whom the veil hides
Hides more than just pretty eyes
A past ruby red and dark as obsidian
No fan can brush away
Here comes the bride
An organ plays
Of an organ played
She was a virtuoso
Practice makes perfect some might say
No my bride to be is not innocent
But then again, neither am I
The Painter's Vision
The sky is not grey
Upon this wedding day
A man waits for whom the picture paints
Not a dark line drawn
She holds within her hand
Not a bouquet but something else
To brush the heat away
What is there to hide her beauty?
Pulled back she is in full display
Pale as ice, no color touches
Her hiding curtain, nor the arraignment her cover
Her cheeks hold no blush
Are her eyes cast down
In devotion
In dread
In sweet resignation?
The sky is not grey
Upon this wedding day
The strokes of the brush
Were not light upon the canvas.
Of the painter’s hand, the lines were not thin.
Warmth was not what his vision sought.
What did he see within the bride
As his paint lay on the canvas?
A splash of color encroaches not from the west
Perhaps an intrusion of his own.
I will tell you not what she holds,
Though it blows its own gale
Cooling on an already icy vision.
This is for a dVerse prompt: For your Poetics prompt today, if you haven’t already guessed, I’d like to write ekphrastic poetry about Chagall’s art. Choose one of the paintings in this post, and compose a poem about it. For an added challenge, use descriptors in your poem to describe the details in the artwork and tell us about what they are, by telling us what they are not.
I did two poems. The second was a more literal reply to the added challenge while the first, my initial poem, is more subtle in the way it addresses the added challenge, saying more of what the bride is not verses describing the painting by telling what it is not. I hope you enjoy! 😊
The Author Stew webpage - Stories & Poems 
I loved the first on the most, telling me a bit more about the bride, it is if you can see within the bride, and the conclusion makes so much sense to me…
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I love that the image inspired a two-for-one response from you, Stew, and that the first is the added challenge while the second is a reply from the painter. The way you hint at the past not only of the bride but also the speaker of you first poem is very clever, with the bride’s ‘past ruby red and dark as obsidian’ and the speaker’s admission at the end. In the painter’s vision, I especially love that the bride ‘holds within her hand not a bouquet but something else to brush the heat away’ that ‘blows its own gale’.
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I especially loved “The Painter’s Vision.”–I will tell you not what she holds,
Though it blows its own gale
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