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Painting Butterflies
by Ken HarnischI have put away the brushes
And the canvass, perhaps for another season,
Another spring,
And maybe for the last time
Since the leaves don’t seem as green anymore
And I am not as spry or willing to
Go painting butterflies
Anymore
You place them on a flower and they flit away
As butterflies do, being butterflies,
And me, being but a man, tainted by associations
With his kind, cannot persuade them to sit
Still for a portrait
That was always more colorful on
The eye than it ever was
The daffodil.
There is something leaving with the spirit
Some mad, maniacal part of me
Whose liquor I drank copiously
And forced others to imbibe
Until they saw, in some final revelatory way,
That I was never so much the drunk
As frenetic, exhausting my sobriety.
The poems do the flitting now
Seeing them, across my mind,
I am reminded that perhaps
My gift is to draw in couplets
The butterflies I saw from my window
But was ordained, at least in this lifetime,
Not to cradle in my hand.
But isn’t that the just desserts of one
Who would go painting butterflies?
02/01/2008 Posted on 02/02/2008
Copyright © 2024 Ken Harnisch
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Elizabeth Shaw on 02/04/08 at 08:41 PM Do you know, this inspires me to go and sit for a friend of mine, the sitting of which I've been putting off or too shy about doing. Perhaps it may not be the partial nude he just deserves, but it's such an honour to be asked to sit by a brilliant painter such as he... and who am i to deny him such a small thing, that he continues to poet in his portraits and not put away the brushes ... as you continue to poet in your potraits here with us. |
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