The Painter

This is for dVerse Poets Pub.

I put it up as a post last year under my "A poem for Thursday" slot and I thought it might resonate with some of the other poems this week.

The blue sky,

  

and a lazy gull,

                

and the shouting laughter

                   

 of young men playing football.

and high in the sky

the boys float and flutter

on warm thermals.

birch leaves whisper 

and turn themselves over

to show pure silver

-rising in price -

they say. 

.

Stelios gives me a fly past

on his way back from those triangular mountains.

and the wood pigeon

moans gently in the tall pine tree.

on the day

the painter died.

[The painter and the painting of course...Lucien Freud

and the boys are the screaming gang of swallows over the field].

A Poem For Friday....The Painter

The blue sky,

  

and a lazy gull,

                

and the shouting laughter

                   

 of young men playing football.

and high in the sky

the boys float and flutter

on warm thermals.

birch leaves whisper 

and turn themselves over

to show pure silver

-rising in price -

they say. 

.

Stelios gives me a fly past

on his way back from those triangular mountains.

and the wood pigeon

moans gently in the tall pine tree.

on the day

the painter died.

[The painter and the painting of course...Lucien Freud

and the boys are the screaming gang of swallows over the field].

A Poem for Thursday.

I was looking through the note book that I keep with all my bits and pieces of thoughts in, and remembered this lot. It's not quite poetry and it's not all mine. But my love of the sea, or at least of being by the sea prompts me to put this post together.

" It's all there.

It's all in the sea.

The battle of life is there,

And fate.

And the inevitability of it all.

And the purpose."

" It's the battle of life - 

The turbulence of the sea.

And life's pretty turbulent, isn't it?

I am very fond of the sea of course;

I have been fond of the sea all my life.

How wonderful it is,

Yet how terrible it is.

But I often think...

What if it suddenly changed it's mind,

And didn't turn the tide?

And came straight on?

If it didn't stop...

And came on ..and on... and on... and on...

That would be the end of it all!

L.S.Lowry 1963 [Salford artist].

 

....And I give you the faces,

- not the permanent masks

But the faces balanced in the toppling wave -----

And I give you the sea and yet again

The sea's tumultuous marble,

With Thor's thunder or taking his ease akimbo,

Lumbering torso, but fingertips amarvel

Of surgeon's accuracy....."

Extract from, Train to Dublin by Louis MacNeice[ Belfast poet].

The lonely tree

Looks out to sea

Looks out to see the weather soft

And seabirds

Flying high aloft.

Muckross Point Donegal.

Irrelevancies

I saw this quote from the Times at the weekend.  Tutor to Paloma Faith [singer], " The medium in which you express yourself is irrelevant. What is important is what you are trying to say." 

When I was at college working towards my B.A. in Fine Art, my struggle was to narrow down the ideas coming from my butterfly mind.
Whether to paint or collage, to use ceramics, installation art or performance.

Then as now the theme running through it all was, the human race on the edge. A place that I knew so well growing up, edge where sea meets land. A very edgy place yet also comforting in the eternal movement of time and tide. I have always been a gatherer of stuff thrown up by the waves. These are often bits thrown overboard, abandoned then changed by the water and salt and continual movement of wind and weather.

These pieces of work are the result of my years of looking and making. they are often a statement of relationships and family trauma and joy.                                                                  

                                 

              

       Sometimes they are just themselves!  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Together they make a statement about life and family and all those ordinary things that are really 

extra-ordinary!