umbilicus

written word
marks on substance
the stain of meaning
time degrades

senseless shape
asemic and unreadable
spirals literal branches
into wordless narrative

integuments of birth
gestate and rewind
like twisted tree-boles
reaching to the sky

hollowed vessels
conduct the oceans
blood is made of
to salt-grained history

conception enfolds
its truth with fictions
an eye’s touch decodes
the braille of creation

fruition scatters
its quantum offspring
random particles
abstract and separate

ideas shorn of mind
reconnect in fragments
their impossible symbols
spell out misdirection

distanced energy
contradicts difference
coeval threads entwine
relation persists

human tongues lick into flame
speech ignites spirit
the word unuttered
echoes in the wind

© BH, 2025

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This is the whole poem, umbilicus, reassembled from its nine (might I say, haiku-like) fragments. Actually, they were extracted from the whole.

The poem was partly an ekphrastic response to an artwork I recently saw and is an exploration of how words accompany the visual.

Often, an artist will explain their work, much as I’m doing here, and I wondered if the explanation could be as much a poem as the artwork is its visual counterpart.