Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025
The Early Warhols 1949 – 1959, poems by John W Sexton.
The Early Warhols 1949 – 1959
In the cloud-spotted sky, light from the moon
was never flat, but fell in funnels
down all the Pittsburgh nights of his youth.
Under a cone of moonlight he beheld
his first transformation of colour,
where cars and buildings were bright in their
mutedness. And the moon itself was constant
in its changing faces. This lesson, much later,
he’d apply to his silk-screen series
of the famous: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis,
Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Harry, Ethel Scull,
Man Ray, Basquiat, Mao Zedong, character
upon character, like the palimpsests
of the moon’s phases. Moonlight, a mere
reflection of something true, would become
a filter towards a new way of seeing.
Though long before that he would be making
his first experiments with repetition,
but in the vivid colours of daylight.
Straight from his degree in illustration he was
selling textile designs of repeating patterns
to Stehi Silks, Fuller Fabrics Incorporated,
M. Lowenstein, Cohama, Balmoral Loom,
and his resultant dress fabrics containing
multiples of pretzels, ice cream sundaes,
toffee apples, nautical flags, bugs,
clocks, luggage tags and suitcases,
bezum brooms and brushes, cut lemons,
buttons, and jumping acrobatic clowns,
were rippling without stop, upon the dresses
upon the bodies of young women
in every American city and town,
all wearing the anonymous art of a for now
unknown, unremarkable, undiscovered Warhol.
A Chime of Hearts
A slow darkness obscured her heart
after the slam of the door. A solstice
froze all light. Her heart took refuge
inside her mind, a wren snuggling into
its own feathery knot of comfort.
A coincidence of déjà vu,
her heart encountered all her hearts
of past hurts; those hearts a confluence
of betrayals, memories congealed
as a stunning now. All of her hearts
converging in warm anxious union –
a nesting of wrens in a winter box.
Chiyo-ni and the Oracle of Cups
Fukuda Chiyo-ni, Japanese poet and latterly Buddhist nun, 1703 -1775
The first bowl of jasmine tea
pours clear from the pot,
a selfless window into nothing.
In the steam from the bowl
she sees her dead husband;
he is unfolding a paper lotus.
The lotus expands into a door.
Her husband enters the door
and bravely closes himself into it.
The second bowl pours golden.
In the oil floating on the tea
she sees a Death Spirit.
The Death Spirit is stretching
her husband between its hands,
kneading him into pale dough.
The Death Spirit drops
the malleable lump of her husband
into a bamboo steamer basket.
The third bowl pours dark.
On the dusky surface of the tea
she sees a moon of dumpling.
Inside the dumpling her husband
is humming like a child.
The dumpling splits open.
From the dumpling a choir
of hornets rises upwards,
a drone of the word “beginning”.
© John W Sexton
John W. Sexton lives on Carn Mór, a mountain on the Kerry side of the Beara peninsula. He identifies with the Aisling poetic tradition and his work spans vision poetry, contemporary fabulism and tangential surrealism. His poetry is widely published and he has been a regular contributor to Live Encounters Poetry & Writing. He is the author of eight poetry collections, the most recent being Futures Pass (Salmon Poetry 2018), Visions at Templeglantine (Revival Press 2020) and The Nothingness Kit (Beir Bua 2022). In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.