A Photography Challenge for Sunday

For the next few weeks, our weekend slots will be used to highlight the photography and creative writing of several Indie artists, whose work is to be found on-line.


I am very excited to be introducing the real toads of the imaginary garden to Ken Simm. 

"I am an Artist, Photographer, Writer and Teacher living and working in the UK. I see no real differences between any facet of my Art. Some work in time, some work in space; that is all.   The Journey is more important than the Destination."

Last Swansong. Whooper Swans, Sound of Sleat, Skye, Scotland

The Last Swansong by Ken Simm


She had fallen undignified to the water some time ago, now was the time for singing.
Slanting rain and thunder on the flood. Weft weave waves hitting a near corpse, possessed only of a primitive panting down a long serpentine neck. Lost now both of cause and mate, sculpture shaped particular only for this watching concern.
She was indeed watched from afar by thoughts that suffered briefly with nauseous concern and a heart that stuttered bouncing along its tortured, naive romantic death path. In tandem, it was imagined, with hers.
Wet the boy who watched and old the legend song he knew as he waited. Whispered, the dripped wishes for the pain to end.
The single, but unresolved, intention was to discover, once she could feel no more, the reasons for her death. The demise on a battleship gun grey day, of a usually mute but still dignified white galleon bird. It was the spoken dissection of a particular cause and then the intended collection of useless, poorly written, notes and blunt pencil drawings.
So, long neck exhausted across the water. Pinioned wing mantling the soft polluted weed. Greyer eye sinking into another time. Single breast feather floating, white on black. Caught by the wind of her dying choreographed. A samite Lady of Shallot floating towards multiple dooms and romance.
Making heavy weather of it; negative light feeding and cold driven storm sky. Turbulence above and below; the long white line lying across the shallow bouncing, Stygian dark waters.
Only Pen, no Cob. No lifetime partner to wish away this day. To infinitely sway the moment into pathos beyond. To bring a shaft of poetic resonance golden to this the memory.
Scudding and calling crossed Gulls and Crows. Tacking into the procedure of this death; vulture waiting as indeed does the other but for different, perhaps more kindly reasons.
Glacial Northern wind and horizontal rain so fine it misted. Sodden final corpse and dripping cold observer caught together in an ageless stamp of sombre, tragic, tactless, theatre.
And now later, dragging a heavy sagged and glassed eyed corpse from these cold prior claimants. Muds that stank and clutched, at feather, at sodden limb, hungry. Colours that diluted to grey as oil stank to death.
Dragged away miles from a wet and still rising flood to box like bedroom laboratory. A candle lit dressing table work bench covered in old newspaper. Cutting away uncaring organ tree with old rusty knife and bleak forensic causes surprisingly discovered. Drawings done of this murders most foul weapon; before burning it in hatred. A fluorescent float and tight ball of fishing line, near invisible in the feathered neck scarred and tarred with dark and bloody mud. Blocking stinking weeds still attached. The long white line now pink splayed and open with undignified cuts and jagged explorations. Finally with a long skull, bleached, white and kept for collectings sake.


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Ken has kindly offered us one of his original images as inspiration for our writing this weekend.  Please visit his website, The Artwork of Ken Simm.

The Lonely Cry ~ Ken Simm

If you use this image on your blog, please acknowledge the name of the artist.


Although this is a "Sunday Challenge", I am posting it on Saturday to allow a little extra time for the creative process.