Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2026
Three Angels in an Icon 2, poem by Richard W Halperin.
Three Angels in an Icon 2
My wife and I frequented
Three Angels when we lived
near the Église Saint-Honoré
d’Alyau, Paris 16th.
An enormous painting
of the icon in a niche
over the altar. They
the three angels –
or are they a kindly
interpretation of God? –
sit around a table
with food or flowers on it.
Years later I bought
a Three Angels icon
for the kitchen wall
of my flat. A table,
with food or flowers
on it, after all.
Three angels in an icon.
A shift to the centre,
and everything takes on
the perspective of fear
of falling, roofs sharply tilted,
faces angular because
that’s what shock does,
or as circular as
the bottom of a well,
colours made of eggs
and of mineral grains,
spasms of love, of creation,
gilt and excrement
taken into account,
originality counting
for nothing because of
the I AM of God –
so one picks up from
the bin the discarded
tools of creation:
proportion, absence,
breath, simplicity,
mercy mercy mercy
because that’s what
the artist needs.
The artist has
fasted and prayed,
fasted and prayed,
has incised lines which
are those of the first
cave paintings, lines
which connect the stars,
which are those on
one’s palm, on the faces
of the very old and
on the faces of children
trashed.
A universe of flat:
of Jerusalem,
of Maalula Syria,
of Novgorod,
of a Patrick Pye copperplate,
of the rack in my flat
where call it clothing
hangs, of keyhole
windows, of knobby trees
caked with Christ’s
blood and with
Kundry’s insomnia.
Something on wood,
a substance which cracks,
something in tempera
an edible substance
which is poison
and which is honey,
platelets of blood and
of ichor, floating things
which are nailed with
rusty nails upon trees, upon
horses, upon the oval
Mother, upon a chuckle
maybe hers, all held by lines
which will not converge
in infinity because who
gives a toss about infinity?
A noci because all icons
are mirrors.
A small gathering,
a conversation which is bread,
a piece of broken wood,
a Simon of Cyrene
because bystanders
are also responsible.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin, born in Chicago in 1943, holds U.S.-Irish dual nationality and lives in Paris. Since 2010, he has seen five collections published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher and twenty smaller collections published by Lapwing/Ballyhalbert. The two most recent Lapwings, just published, are Silk Threads and Some Walk with Stilts. ‘Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?’ from his 2025 Salmon All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems was Poem of the Week in The Guardian January 19th. A new poem ‘Echoes of a River’ is on the Danish artist Else Pia Martinsen Erz web site, as a tribute to her painting ‘Faith and Migratory Birds’ in which refugees and geese are treading through puddles of water toward a small hole in the sky.