Written June 2026
Prompt: Using your intuition and imagination, summon up a visage of your own. Then write a poem or short story that elaborates on this image, telling a story and communicating, perhaps indirectly, the emotions that you associate with your visage.
Silent, but murmuring—
Motionless, but shifting—
yet awake and asleep,
nonchalant and pleading,
a procession of notes—
a harmonic frown—
awaiting the transformation
from ink into sound.
Inspirations and Comments
I wrote this poem in response to a prompted exercise from a language arts curriculum. The exercise was part of a word list containing the word visage; the goal of the activity was to see if you could come up with an interesting and unorthodox mental image of a visage. I chose to write a poem about a face conceived in musical notes, as I had often seen the mental picture while playing through piano pieces or composing music in MuseScore.
This poem takes a nonstandard form, with lines three and four rhyming (asleep, pleading) and lines six and eight rhyming (frown, sound). There is no rhyme scheme or conscious use of meter, except for the similarity in the forms of the first two lines (noun, but verb). In writing this poem, I had to contemplate the fact that a “visage” of musical notes is indeed alive and capable of making facial expressions, like a harmonic frown or a pleading countenance that begs to be noticed among a sea of chords and rhythms.