A spring morning – well, <br />I only need to say the words? <br />I’ll picture mine, you picture yours – <br />champagne bubbling in the blood and in the mind, <br />hopes and possibilities flooding freshly in.. <br /> <br />but a spring mid-afternoon… like today, like now: <br />a subtle balance of the elements; <br />the sunlight bathes the room, but gently, <br />with its promise; yet, <br />there’s a timeless peace with it <br />that’s like a life surveyed; yet <br />free of thought, of comparison, or of regret: <br /> <br />the six loved paintings that adorn the walls <br />bought for a song, when art was like a song – <br />they love the gentle sunlight, and it in turn loves them; <br />five artists painting their sunlit peace, their happiness; <br />(two very different ones from the man <br />who lives so humbly halfway up <br />the mountain hills he rambles every day): <br />three oils; one gouache; one watercolour; and one pastel; <br /> <br />they all but two have clouds in them <br />as they’re all landscapes; <br />one that hasn’t, has a haze as if <br />the painter’s painting the summer wind, in those high hills.. <br />the other is a cloudless morning’s peace, <br />the bend of a river in mid-France; <br />the river…it cannot be, just painted oil? <br />it’s water seen as by a pure clear soul… <br /> <br />and the clouds – caught in an impossibility of time, <br />play out an endless drama of the elements; <br />timeless in the peace of, now, a slightly later <br />springtime afternoon; almost with a touch... <br />but how could perfection ever regret <br />its own departure?<br /><br />Michael Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/spring-afternoon/
