“The Scream”
The painter’s concept of the sound
is wrong, demonstrably.
The vowel from a mouth long-round
is oh. One screams on ee.
The chin dropped nearly to the toes
suggests the work should be,
to match the sound it surely shows,
retitled The High C.
Donald Mace Williams, a retired newspaper writer and editor and also former professor, has a book of poetry, Wolfe and Other Poems, which was published in London in 2017 and is now available in the United States. He lives in the Texas Panhandle.