Tuesday, March 26, 2019

This is the Woman


Joan R., Baltimore, 1967

This is the woman who
drained her toilet dry
 painting butterflies in enamel
spiraling ‘round the bowl
to dance in every flush

This is the woman who
pushed all her bedroom furniture
together to create
a bower tower  bird nest
beneath the deep blue ceiling
she’d painted and covered
with luminescent stars

this is the woman who
was driven to paint wildly
a strange abstract work
she brought for us to see:

black zigzagging, sliding
scaring the blood  red ground
halted by a  grand orange X

We gazed bedazzled
Colors, lines screaming  out to us
and Joan,  as if waking with a cry
 muttered
“of god, this is where . . .
he died”

This is the woman
Who drove the VW bug
that skidded and killed
the man we all called Angel
The perfect blue-eyed hippie
All in love, but not lovers like Joan

Brazenly mapped before us
now
forever
the pain scarring scaring her mind

(middle of the night meditation/poem)
 3/26/19  jmf-w





Thursday, March 14, 2019

TBT: School of Fish Revisited

Paper coming unglued, colors fading.  I just made anew, an old work, of shifting name, the latest "A Flight for Unity".  Now redone, fish on new acrylic painted canvas paper, the base a patina of resin, to keep the watercolor from fading and blue painters tape drying, she now comes with a new poem.  For Carolyn.  A bit past black history month, but perfect for also for women's history month.


For Carolyn Greer, NCHS Class of 1965

Sometimes we walk among giants
Heroes, whom we call by other names
With venom or salacious smile, jigaboo or nigger
Or if polite or kind, colored girl or negro,
Rarely, which some still refuse to do
Call her by her name

We can blame the age, we can blame our teenage
Society or religion, but we can denote
That beneath those guises
humanity sometimes arises

She was a first
The first, a negro in our class
among the tribe of teens 
classes by social status
athlete or scornfully academic
by wealth or poverty
by town, and there by side of the tracts
farm, town or family ties
secure in our supreme color
until Carolyn broke the mold

That was her, the giant, quiet, and respectful
not haughty, proud or pretty
just a gentle, smiling without malice
alarmingly without façade
Car-o-lyn, her one assertive gesture
discreet, affirmative

She broke us, this quiet lady
the mold those centuries had built
Jim Crowe and malice had constructed
She swam against the current
To break the bondage of slavery
Not quite lost, grits upon the teem
colonial coronels  and southern belles
confederate fiction believed as gospel true
Tara and Rhett Butler, the antebellum froth
glued the savage whites together
In hypothetic piety, in the Lord’s whitewashed house

Out of our teenage innocence,
Clothed in ignorance
Humanity wrapped in garments
Violently sealed in evangelical words
Carolyn helped us take the baby steps
into the sunlight of the possible heaven
the dream of colorblindness
of unity and honor,
and oh, yes, truth, justice and a maybe
to quote the Superman, the true American way

14 March 2019; Women’s Month