Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Jonathan Beale- Three Poems


The day of the dead

After the mural: The Day of the Dead by Diego Rivera 1923 – 1924. South Wall Court of the Fiesta’s, Ministry of Education, Mexico City. 

They, after long day’s done
They hang in bars, around cars

Playing their guitars
They are invisible

To the naked human eye ocean
Still they are there mingling

Among teachers, preachers
Hobos, brokers, & grease monkeys

Immeasuable generations’ Día de Muertos
still understand the elixir no the loss

as those souls of the near
and far departed

tarantism tap tap away the blues
from all saints daily news

the sparkling sculls mingle among
the day and living in a new marriage  



Mother and Child 1921 Otto Dix

They, not the perfect ideal of mother and child
In their lack of money, so apparent

As they are joined and always will be
Their eyes project a simple honest love

An endless immortal love seemingly
Tangible.  Her pale complexion allegorical

As she looks spent and the infant too, there
Is poverty in every corner in every city. 

The wall strewn with bullet marks she
and her child secondary victims of war

perhaps.  There is an absolute beauty here
from heaven? The classical world? Our world. 



Pictorial Space

‘I used to think that pictorial space wasn’t that important.  Slowly I began to realise it is much more important than we think – than I thought previously, anyway – because it makes the viewer begin to see the world in another way, perhaps a clearer way.  We can’t all be seeing the same thing; we are all seeing something a bit different.’  David Hockney     

The surface reels around
Drawing and repelling
Playing and ignoring
The external world spewing problems
That the senses cannot solve

Geometry is half relation
To every other dimension
The key to turn
The combination
Rewritten in any order

Another order –flip,
Trip, jump, and jive.
Open the door that leads….
To the garden?
Deserts are keepers of space

In the garden for instance
The light drops down
In perfect accident
Glimmering and glistening
Until the stars are…

Pictorial space
The product of where eyes
Cross.  With Bertrand Russell’s
Table for instance:
Singularly unique

And yet somehow universal
to all.  As lights fading perceptions  
perhaps ‘because it makes the viewer
begin to see the world in another way,
perhaps a clearer way.’


1 comment:

  1. Diego Rivera and Otto Dix would both see the allusive and elusive reality in this panorama of colorful images in a modern poet who is close to
    reflecting the language of a surreal revelation in a
    paint job of art's revolutionary time regained by the poet.

    ReplyDelete