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Unpolished Ink Jul 2020
Seen it all

       My face is the wall

     And life is the frame

     No picture the same
Sharon Talbot Jul 2020
Imagine the bombed-out fields of Japan,
Wandering families with no food.
A little girl soothes her brother,
Who is so hungry, he must cry.
“Let’s imagine a menu,” she tells him
And the tears stop for a while.
Many years later, her son will say,
Of a balloon without a skin,
“There’s no point if you don’t imagine it.”
Imagine Britain after the Blitz,
Young man roaming the streets
Mind craving, surviving on 45 records
From the USA. How could he help
But become an artist and rebel?
Picture the canyons of New York City,
Where galleries peek like jewels in the dust.
The girl from Japan and the British boy,
Both imagining something more.
She sets up a ladder to the sky,
He wanders in and climbs it
And to all his questions, especially “Why?”
She has imagined a small and simple “Yes.”
You can probably guess which girl and boy this is about...
Jennifer Herbert Jun 2020
You drew her in
Like the last breath you'd ever take
Drowning in her eyes
Hitting the blue and silver wakes

She reached for your hand
Shaking you from your slow descent
Her touch like a velvet rose
A warmth without an end

She laughs and you close your eyes
Hanging her smile in your mind
A gallery of your favorite pieces
Her portrait a one of a kind
irises Feb 2020
Sometimes the vast window opens
Fractured
But forgiving

Knowing everyone else does it too
Empathy for the shared shadow of all else who
Desperately fell

There is a dusty harmony
A musty and dark air
Tainted with the protruding strength of her infinite suns

And they all can hardly breathe
As her flowers suffocate them
Because they were trying for her
Not them.

She wondered whether the beginning was all a trap,
Covered in the illusion that true light was outlandish,
Leaving her in the dark.
up for interpretation
annh Sep 2019
Dream your life in watercolours,
Live your life in oils,
Frame your canvases with time and distance;

Hang each by a silver thread,
In a windowed gallery of memories,
Exhibit often and without discrimination;

Celebrate the beauty in your clumsiest brushwork,
Accept the imperfections in your mastery,
Reshape your truths, as light plays and colour transforms.

‘If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.‘
- Émile Zola
Peter Balkus Aug 2019
The gallery is closing soon,
hurry up,
don't say you will come
another time.

I bet you want to see "Sunflowers".
You say you can wait.

You can? Okay, but
what if they can't?
Written after my visit to The National Gallery in London.
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