They say a painting hangs in silence,
but listen closer.
There’s breath in the pigment,
ache in the line.
Each stroke: a fingertip pressed to time
a plea,
a promise,
a person,
or a price.

Da Vinci’s Mona wasn’t for you.
Klimt’s lovers weren’t thinking of your ache.
Picasso broke forms, not hearts,
and yet we all see ourselves in his fractures.
Van Gogh painted stars
not to claim the sky,
but to survive it.

Caravaggio lit his sinners with holy fire,
while Vermeer captured silence
as if it were a form of prayer.
Frida poured pain like molasses onto linen.
Turner wept storms into colour.
O'Keeffe painted the body
without apology.
Chagall made lovers float
because gravity was too dull for love.

What madness, then,
to say a moment
is yours
because the pose feels familiar?
Because you too saw two figures beneath a tree?
As if love and death
are trademarks,
as if a cherub in the clouds
belongs to one man’s hand.

No two said, “you stole my sun,”
though they all painted it.
No master shouted theft
when another touched sorrow
with the same red.

The artist owns not the subject,
but the sweat.
The trembling hand.
The night stared down with doubt.
The day it was finally finished.
And more sacred still
every moment
they toiled,
half-blind with longing,
to make something
that might be
beautiful.

And here’s the irony:
today’s loudest mouths
the self-appointed guards of “originality”
pen their spare lines with surgical caution,
write in whispers
to avoid the radar of truth.
Minimal not by craft,
but by fear
fear of artificial detection,
the same that bleeds through
minimal lines.

Yet the quiet hypocrisy shows
in the empty space between their words,
the absence of soul where colour should be.
For the difference is this:

One form dares the test.
The other
hides from it,
until they meet.