VISIONS AND REVISIONS

 

A Painting by Janet Weight Reed

 

 

VISIONS AND REVISIONS

 

Endless visions and revisions

will follow every work of art,
its end is also its beginning.

A cat straining to catch its tail

to earn its master’s delight?
But that’s not the metaphor.

When the last image attaches

itself to a final web of moving
yet still pictures on a canvas,

when the impasto of colours

have shaped the unuttered
angst trembling on the easel,

when sounds have moulded

sense into a riot of language,
creation is done, work begins.

Will the poem sing brightly?

Will the painting now speak?
When are they truly finished?

He shaped a man out of clay

and thought him imperfect,
he needed her to be complete.

How hard it must be for Him

to watch them destroy what
grows out of their love and loin.

Yet he was proclaimed good

and perfect among the trees
and the mud dried out of Eden.

How hurtful it must be for one

to start from the wreckage
of what began from ardent love.

---Albert B. Casuga