Lost in a Painting #Laugh Along a Limerick

Artwork by Vladimir Kush

I once had a strange, wacky dream

Where lost in a painting, I seemed,

There an elephant goes,

With a horn for its nose,

Better this than Munch’s The Scream.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

This was a response to Esther’s Challenge for a Laugh Along a Limerick, to write a limerick that included the word dream. At first, I was looking to Salvador Dali for inspiration, but, searching the Internet, I came across this surrealistic art by Vladimir Kush. Do you notice that the antelope has a lyre between its horns, the foliage is also made of horns and that there are musical notations in the cloud shapes? It is bizarre, fantastical and dreamy but not unpleasant. In fact, an explanation on Kush’s site talks about “a fresh, positive side of surrealism.”

What Do I See?

Hermann Rorschach, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I think I only see a smudge

Or aliens guzzling down fudge,

Seahorses kissing sea urchins

or seaweed undersea lurking,

Eiffel Tower by Picasso,

An odd man with green mustachios,

Strange one-clawed acrobatic crabs

With ostentatious derby hats,

What malady’s inflicting me?

Imagination’s all I see.

© Susan Joy Clark 2021

This is for dVerse’s Monday quadrille challenge. By their definition, a quadrille is a poem with exactly 44 words. Our poems had to include the word “smudge.”