Image: “All of Us” by Lou Storey. “The World Beneath” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

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Devon Balwit

THE WORLD BENEATH

Peel the disappointed world back to its precursor—a child’s town of bright primaries, streets where the sun finds no impediment and the wind none richer, none poorer. No one suffers or dies there—not even one invisible dog sniffing the blue salt air. The boats in the harbor, the phone poles, the hills and the houses all speak a language before language,that tuneful hum above the shapes in a board-book. There even shadows hesitate to fall, mother nowhere in sight, the afternoon lazy and long.—from Ekphrastic Challenge
April 2023, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Megan O’Reilly: “As the title indicates, the poet imagines Lou Storey’s colorful and complex piece as depicting a ‘precursor’ to our current world (‘the disappointed world’), a more pure and essential civilization, and after viewing it through that lens, I can’t see it any other way. I found the language here to be irresistibly interesting, effortless lines that so aptly describe a place that doesn’t quite exist but is simultaneously more real than reality. I was particularly struck by ‘the houses all speak / a language before language, / that tuneful hum above / the shapes in a board-book,’ which I interpret as an incredible expression of the primitive way we experience the world as pre-verbal children, and a passage that will stick in my mind for a long time.”

Related* “This Room” by Devon Balwit * “Faces in the Clouds” by Devon Balwit * “Cinderella Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” by Devon Balwit