Parc Lafontaine, Montreal, May 1 2020, gouache and pencil in Moleskine pocket sketchbook
Forsythia
It caught my eye a while ago, lit up
against the gloom of the woods
in the corner of a wild field,
the pulsing color of caution.
And now that I have spent a little time
on this stone wall watching its fire
flare out of the earth
I begin to think about the long chronicle of forsythia
how these same flowers have blazed
through the centuries,
roused from the ground by the churning of spring.
I would rather not look around the next
corner of the year to see how this will die,
its lights going out,
its bare, arcing branches
waving like whips in the bitter wind.
So I sit facing the past,
letting my feet dangle over the wall,
beating time against stone with my heels
as the long gray clouds roll over me.
Remember how Arnold by the Channel
thought of Sophocles who must have heard
the same shore-sounds long ago,
walking by the edge of the Aegean?
Well, I am holding in the palm of my thoughts
all the others who once were stopped,
like me, by this brightness,
this sulfuric cry for help:
women in tunics, women gathered by a well,
men in feathers, men swimming by a river,
all speaking languages I will never know,
saying the different words for its color
as I feel the syllables of yellow form in my mouth
and hear the sound of yellow fill the morning air.
-- Billy Collins
I love the pink and the Green!
Posted by: Marie | May 03, 2020 at 06:54 PM
The poem is new to me and I love it, both as a poem and because I'm increasingly drawn to reading about people surviving in the past - all too aware of how the present disaster is both just like all those that went before and uniquely different because of globalisatiion and the planetary collapse already happening. And amidst all this your painting, with the vivid flame of blossom and its bending downwards, is very special because it comes to us so immediately. Beautiful - thank you.
Posted by: Jean | May 04, 2020 at 03:24 AM
Lovely -- painting and poem -- especially with forsythia finally in full bloom here too.
Posted by: Liz Nestler | May 04, 2020 at 09:52 AM
Beautiful pairing of word and image, both singing their own song.
Posted by: Natalie | May 04, 2020 at 11:25 AM