A’s story “Mourning” spoke to me today.

Yesterday I visited the Norton Simon Museum. After walking through a room filled with Monet's, Degas’, Cezanne's, and colorful Pissaro’s I happened upon a small painting that seemed out of context with the rest of the work in the room. Not the brightest or most optimistic painting, it is a picture of a worker who appears to be clearing a path, with barren trees, gray sky and muddy snow. In one of his many letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh likens the painting to his view on the parallels between the bleak landscape and peasant life: “The life and death of peasants remain forever the same, withering regularly, like the grass and flowers growing in that churchyard”.

• • •

Something's happening here

It’s a bumpy road
filled with potholes
old promises strewn aside
littered and forgotten

Was it a highway?
was it traveled on at high speeds
so fast that no one saw the pavement
no one would heed the warning?

caution, oneway, stop, yield, merge

There lies what is left of a crushed soda can
a cigarette butt, broken glass
high above the cement pond
screeching

a hawk looking for a tidbit
of some lost yesterday
on that broken road of a
broken time and promises

used in passing

• • •

Image: Taken with my iphone, a poor rendition of a beautiful work of art.