Christina’s World

This is a poem about Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World.  I wrote this when I was 19 or 20, so it has a young man’s perspective.  View Christina’s World

There are paintings

               below paintings

and so there are lives

               below lives.

When paintings crack, we see

               the paint below,

               unseen figures and scenes.

When illusions crack, we see

               the lives below.

 

Beautiful maiden

half-reclined

reflecting

on idyllic countryside.

 

For years I pass by;

beauty means beauty, nothing more.

 

But one day…

 

My eyes feels the pentamento in my heart.

I see her hair knotted, not young and flowing.

Her hands twisted, polio.

She crawls, not sits.

And the smoothed sloped hill now rises in enormity not eternity.

 

Task of Sisyphus.

Silent St. Joan.

 

Brothers:

               When the thick paint in our hearts crack

will we peel it back and see through

                              the beauty we imagine

                              the uglyness we avoid

               to:

                              the power of the twisted hands

                              the beauty of the knotted hair

                              the determined hidden eyes.

               Will we rise with her to the steepness of the task?