For dVerse Poets Pub

For dVerse Poets Pub – Where Melissa is our host.

Welcome to dVerse Poetics.

Melissa from Mom With a Blog here, bringing you your poetic prompt, drinks, and snacks.

When looking around for spooky paintings, since it is spooky season, I came across this list of “reportedly haunted” works of art. I thought it might be fun to compose poems about them. Some of the paintings are just as creepy as the strange tales surrounding them.

Edvard Munch’s The Dead Mother, while perhaps not as famous as The Scream, is equally as disturbing. In this painting, viewers see a child covering their ears while a bedridden woman lay in the background. The artist created several versions of this painting (with different names), all illustrating what is thought to be an event from the artist’s own life, as his mother died from tuberculosis when Munch was aged five.

A haunting

When Silence Became a Sound

Inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Dead Mother (1899)

I pressed my hands against my ears,
but silence found its way inside.

The room was full of whispered words,
of footsteps trying not to sound,
of grown-ups looking anywhere
except into my eyes.

Mother lay beneath the sheets,
her face as pale as winter light.

I waited for her chest to rise,
for one familiar, gentle breath,
for someone to explain
why morning felt so cold.

They said that she was sleeping.

But sleeping mothers wake.

They said that she was peaceful.

Then why did everyone look afraid?

I stood between the bed and door,
too small to understand forever,
too frightened to ask
where forever begins.

Perhaps if I closed my eyes,
the room would disappear.

Perhaps if I covered my ears,
the words would never reach me.

But grief has no footsteps.
It enters without knocking,
sits beside a child
and teaches her a language
she was never meant to learn so young.

Years would pass.

The walls would change,
the bed would vanish,
and strangers would study
the sorrow painted in my eyes.

They might call the picture haunted.

But no ghost walks these rooms.

Only a little girl
still waiting for her mother
to open her eyes.

And somewhere inside the silence,
a child is asking—

If I cannot hear goodbye,
does it still mean you are gone?

---

https://www.blenza.com/linkies/links.php?owner=dversepoets&postid=20Oct2026&meme=12476

---

— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫

With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,

---

New songs out .

My song is out on streaming platforms.

https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken

---

If you want a reading, send me an email:

Afterlove-Voice@hotmail.com

---