Monet's Waterlilies

Claude Monet

Water Lilies

Monet's Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon

poisons the air like fallout,

I come again to see

the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light

the eye like the eye of faith believes.

The seen, the known

dissolve in iridescence, become

illusive flesh of light

that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that world

each of us has lost.

Here is the shadow of its joy.

~ Robert Hayden ~

Those Winter Sundays

Paul Cezanne

The Artist’s Father

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

~ Robert Hayden ~