To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston  and Public Poetry partnered to create The Game, a FREE activity, for the entire month of April 2014.

POEMS & CLUES

Clue 1:  This American artist’s most prominent work is at Rockefeller Center in New York City. You’ll find this near other American art.

Poem 1:  by Gwendolyn Zepeda

Weight

They say a good deed doesn’t go unpunished.
His punishment is more than most could bear.
His shoulders broad and arms both bronzed and burnished
Support a weighty metaphor for cares.
His fashion statement is more roared than spoken.
Accessorized with clasps of tiny sabers.
He kneels, awaits a promise soon unbroken
So that he may continue with his Labors.
You see his form and want to know:
if that’s above, then what’s below?

Clue 2: The Law Building has, mostly, non-Western art. Look for this Asian object in blue and white.

Poem 2:  by Martha Serpas

i will no longer obey the rule of celestial bodies.
i am cold and graceful, impervious
to color and time. This spiny myth
is a prophecy fulfilled in your hearing.
i will no longer obey the rule of celestial bodies.
The sun and the moon blend in my throat
like glacier-filled seas. After my just labor
i rest my claws on banks of clouds.
i wrap my milky hips
with my tail and sleep.

Clue 3: This artist was born in Russia but fled to France to escape persecution. Look in one of the Beck Building galleries with coral-colored walls.

Poem 3: by Mike Alexander

Aquatic vase
exposes roses’ bride,
cumulous days
limpidly implied;
high on a shelf,
the shoreline & the sea,
she fans herself
into a fantasy.

Clue 4: Look in one of the Museum’s longest galleries, in the Beck Building, for this painting by an artist who was born in Switzerland, lived mostly in Germany, but died in Britain

Poem 4: by Bao-Long Chu

Even now They are Leaving
The indigo darkness
fell around them like a wreckage,
debris of blue sky washed
up against his shoulders, his thighs
tender, closed in shameful
nakedness. The woman, ghostly,
clung to him, a drowning
in her body, thorns and thistles
in the promised future.
The serpent is not there,
but imagine the betrayal,
the thin licking hiss just
at the left edge of the gilt frame.
dawn chorus of mourning
doves hushes as the man guides her,
his ivory hand at her
heart, both stepping barefoot into
dust, praying, over and over.

Mike Alexander published his first full-length collection,Retrograde, available at www.pandjpoetics.com as well as an additional four poetry chapbooks. He has been on the editorial board of The Lyric, Panhandler, and Mutabilis Press, and ran the weekly poetry open mic at Helios for six years out of its ten-year run.

Artist Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak was born in Cleveland, Ohio, completed her undergraduate art studies at Kent State University, studied at the Corcoran School of Art and, in 1977, received her MFA in painting from George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Since 1991, the artist has participated in several national and international exhibitions and been awarded artist residencies in France, Ukraine, and US venues. She is currently on the studio faculty of the Glassell School of Art. See more of her work on her website.

Originally from Vietnam, Bao-Long Chu earned an MFA in poetry from the Creative Writing Program at UH, and is currently the associate director for Writers in the Schools (WITS). His poems and essays have been published in several anthologies; in 2014, his libretto for Houston Grand Opera’s East + West initiative, Bound, premiered.

Martha Serpas has two collections of poetry, Côte Blanche and The Dirty Side of the Storm. Her third,The Diener, will be published in 2015. Her work has appeared inThe New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, image, andSouthwest Review. She is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at The University of Houston.

Gwendolyn Zepeda is Houston’s first poet laureate. Her first poetry collection, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners, was published by Arte Publico Press in 2013. Her second is forthcoming. In addition to poetry, Zepeda has published three critically acclaimed novels through Hachette, four award-winning children’s books through Arte Publico Press, and a short-story collection.