The Painting & Poetry Project 2021

Week 15: Wind

Year 2021. What does it mean to you? To Addie and I, it is full of hope and promise. It is a turning point. The beginning of the end of a pandemic. The end of a volatile presidency and a return to sensible governance. The end of quarantines, isolation, and social distancing and a return to physical human interaction. We will once again congregate, gather with those we love, see them up close, touch and feel again … not in an impersonal virtual space, but in the very real and beautiful world.


WEEK 15

The 15th theme for the year is Wind.

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

ADDIE’S PAINTING

Albatross in the Wind


MY POEM

Old Man of the Desert

An old man walks alone, barefoot
on sand that cuts like broken crystal
under a blinding empyrean.

The denizens of his village deride his wandering,
yet he bears no witness to their pale mockery.
His heart is bursting with the empty desert
its mute measure deafens his ears with love songs.

The East wind lifts him up
(he trusts it as a suckling might of its mother),
and it carries him past the Valley of Kings,
where Pharaohs fearfully sleep,
past the Sacred Lake of Thebes,
and the dust of man’s apotheotic delusions,
to the desert’s dawning edge.

His thirst becomes his compass,
and though his lips are parched
and cracked like bricks of mud
baking under a sweltering, neolithic sun,
he sings—
as a young gypsy girl sings
and dances under the cool, spangled moon,
and tumbles out of the oasis
on a playfully salvational breeze.


ABOUT THE PAINTING & POETRY PROJECT

Brad & Addie

We want to celebrate 2021 with an outpouring of creativity and optimism!

We’ve selected 52 themes (one theme per week for the year), and each week for 2021, I will write a poem and Addie will paint a painting inspired by that theme.

This is the sort of big project that artists live for … where we can say what we yearn to say.  Big picture stuff. Heart wrenching stuff. Expect surprises, love, and a passion for life.

Check Out Addie’s Instagram Account: www.instagram.com/alchemy.of.art.addie.hirschten/

Check out Addie’s art studio — Studio Alchemy:
studioalchemy.art/


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