Pocket Paintings
Peintures de Poche

My usual discipline has deserted me and, as a result, I have deserted my blog, abandoned it, gone absent without leave. It’s not that I am not creating: I am. I am just not posting. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought that, for a change, I would post some of my Pocket Paintings / Peintures de Poches. Maybe I will be inspired to write verse about them. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Supplication

I raise my hand to heaven
in fervent supplication:
you sever it at the wrist.

I spread out my arms in despair:
you take out a tape and measure me
for a tailor-made, hand-crafted cross.

I step on my bathroom scales
only to find that they have become
the scales of your justice:
I mourn every pound I have put on.

Where can I turn for solace
when all around I see
nothing but sorrow and tears?

Covid bears us all down.
An albatross, it hangs around our necks
and when we raise a hand,
your knife is there to cut it off.

Who are you? What are you?
Where are you when we need you?
Why are you there judging us like this?

I look up at the sky.
By day, a great cyclopean eye
winks and blinks and tells me nothing.
I look at the sky at night:
a silver moon slides silently by.

Orion stalks away to the west.
He leaves me restless, breathless,
agape at all this beauty
that I dare not reach out and grasp.