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I painted this piece for the SCBWI monthly illustration challenge. The April prompt was "Cooped up." I decided to focus on the collective experience, all of us cooped up, as well as on the space between us, fraught with danger and yet so full of possibility.  How will we fill it, all this space between us? Will our dreams and good intentions be enough?
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 The storm will pass
And you will leave the house and walk Until you find A shiny upside-down world left behind By the rain. You’ll want to fall Into the vice versa-world of What might be. However, you, Once a puddle-jumping child, Learned long ago That you can’t fall into the sky. And so you’ll look For the magic beanstalk seed That will grow down into the promised land At your feet. Copyright 2020 Anna Witte  Bad weather horses shake their manes
And drown the world in sheets of rain Their breath blinds windows to the light Their temper turns day into night We make small rooms out of our fear And curl the heart into a fist And hope the chimney will not fall And hope that meal was not our last And hope this sheet is not a shroud And that we didn’t hear their shrieks In the sky above the clouds. Those who don’t trust, wish they could pray, And those who pray, begin to doubt That there ever was a summer That unfurled our wrinkled souls When we ran toward each other Across meadows made of gold Where we shed the furs of winter And swam naked in a stream Where we kissed those we would never Dare to kiss outside a dream. ©2020 Anna Witte  I lie wishing for an angel
To lean in close, Place a cool, androgynous hand on my head And quell this anxious fire when Shrill chatter pulls me out of bed And to the window. Would we need angels if We understood these bats That beat their wings Against the soul? ©2020 Anna Witte |
A little about myself:Hello there and thank you for visiting my website! I have lived in Spain, Mexico, France and the United States, but now make my home in Germany. I have a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and a Master's in TESOL, and have published several books for children, among them El Loro Tico Tango and El Fandango de Lola, a 2012 Ezra Jack Keats Honor Book. As a writer and an artist I'm in constant conversation with my own anxious mind even as I celebrate the joyful possibilities of our crazy, incomprehensible world. Archives
August 2020
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