She suffered greatly,
there is no doubt,
and out of this suffering
came her art.
Much of it gruesome,
some of it grotesque,
but in the best,
a beauty of a brutal kind.
Perhaps we’ll find no word
for it
except to say she endured.
Somehow, making portraits of
herself
helped her soul grow wings.
Painting with blood knit her
spirit,
nurtured it like a tree,
and gave her a handhold
as she crawled through days
of pain.
In her pictures we can hear a
voice that sings,
not like an angel but a
wounded child,
a voice that often cracks,
gasps, croaks
with agony but never wails or
whines,
endures each hammer stroke
with head held high.
Her soul is tremulous like a
violin,
and each brush stroke plays a
note
with dignity and with
terrible force
as if suffering were the
natural course
for every woman
who still has the keeping of
her heart.
Nothing strangled in her
jangled pain,
nothing tangled, nothing
mangled,
it is simple pain, pure and
plain,
splattered with grace upon a
canvas
for all who have the courage
to look upon her nakedness
without shame.
(From the book Land of Sun and Stone, Poems About Mexico)
No comments:
Post a Comment