Ekphrasis

Regret. The feeling she felt the most was not pain nor sadness, but regret. She wondered, “Who will forgive me now?” Not her daughter, husband, or any person remotely in her life. A sense of shame poured over her tortured, monstrous soul, just look at her posture on the lonely, empty child-sized bed. The decisions she made to satisfy the thoughts scrambled throughout her brain. The decisions she chose to carry out for the approval of others when ‘others’ don’t exist. The inklings in her brain caused her to grow distant from her own life. From her own husband. From her own child. From her own sense of belonging. From herself. Something took over my body, she rationalized. There are no excuses for the things she did. None. Who will forgive her now? Who?

I chose this visual piece because I remembered that this photographer created eerie yet realistic scenes and I really admired the dedication behind his work. I chose to do a non-traditional poem by explaining in paragraph form what the woman in the picture has done. The piece’s essential details to me are the woman’s posture and facial expression, the nighttime setting, the room she is in and the messiness of the floor. My ‘translation’ preserves the original by stating the woman’s facial expression, the fact she has a child and most likely a family including a husband, and that something traumatic must have happened before the photo was taken. My work attempts to capture the mood and feeling of the original image because I used words such as regret, pain, sadness, etc. I referenced the title of the image and I also included a sense of a twist by adding the element that she could be guilty of doing a heinous act against her family. My ekphrasis brought a new sense of dark emotions and different scenarios to the picture.