Nature's Cry
The old on empty roads
head for the vanishing point;
the young between façades
feel nature’s vertigo.
I paint the pain outdoors,
angst in the landscape,
where an undulating line
runs through life’s frieze.
She was in my blood, father.
When we touched each other,
a reddish shadow brooded
over nature. For six years,
in café and street and forest,
I never ceased to feel
the shadow of her lovers.
The living who claim freedom,
like the dead, nourish our roots.
the land and I writhe together;
fear climbs the air;
which fear I paint.
How I wish to be high up,
held in, cut off, looking down,
undizzied, like Nietzsche,
saying yes to life.
The fell sides fall sheer;
the column pours upward
from this village at dusk,
by the steamboat landing,
in the ice-scarred land,
where I swarm up a vortex,
toward a midnight sun.
Homage to Edvard Munch
Memory enchants me,
in this sombre house,
where I paint on canvas
furnished by my aunt
who rocks in her black chair,
against lace-curtained light,
rocks and thinks in her heavy chair.
In the neighbour room my sister,
propped on cushions,
with her orange, ruddy hair,
suffers in oil. As her slow disease
pursues its course, I watch her gaze
through sea-green curtains,
at a pine house amid orchard trees.
Above in bed I crouch,
my mother lies below
amid the smell of fir
and burning wax and pine,
Berta sang and I
recall how I saw angels
floating in open sky;
my mother stroked our cheeks,
and said goodbye.
I who write my epitaph
within a gas-lamp glow,
hear children sing,
smile and weep and laugh.
My father Christian,
apart in his low chair,
metes out punishment
to children of sin.
Life shrinks to the shape
which prays at the bed’s foot.
Death, insanity, disease,
were angels at my cradle.
In this still air,
I paint my religion of despair.
In breathless awe,
I render what I see,
of what I saw.
©Terry Hodgson2020
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