Vincent

We accept your gifts, as we try to understand, there in your bedroom, Vincent.

Looking on, analysing, still basking in your flourish.

Together again for a time, albeit fleeting.

We've grown as brothers grow, and understand as families do,

The torment of need, a desire to fulfil purpose, the love of giving or receiving.

 

We all know you, we’ve met you,

We bowed to you in a crowd, as you too bowed to the peasants,

In the fields, to be allowed,

To paint the faceless bodies, toiling, stacking hay,

Under turbulent clouds in swirling skies, hills and land in sway.

 

Maybe it’s not your tired old leather boots or the peonies and roses that endeared us to

 you, Vincent.

But rather your embrace of the simplistic, the importance of the everyday,

You found a way to widen eyes and raise heads,

The way sunflowers did

for the colours of your mind.

 

Oh, then Jesus man we heard you cry when the letters stopped to questions of why,

And fell away like slow cooked meat from bones,

Your face in the mirror perhaps just reflections of us.

 

Honestly though, it’s what we all trust,

Finding some truth from the splash of you brush,

So we might look as you saw,

On the canvas to find, ourselves to know,

In all the colours of your mind.

 

 

Graeme Golding 2017©