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The sunday painter

Snow shrouds every boundary.
Even when rain rinses the air clear
it's still severe with this wind
galloping across washed prospects
where Mezereon flowers shiver
under mare‘s-tail clouds.
There is nowhere to go. Unless….

Torn from a laboured landscape
hung in some provincial gallery,
the peasant bears his scythe
over a fallow field. Obsolete,
he enters the horizon‘s light.
It accepts his sweat, investing
every bead with a constellation.
And this is God‘s covenant.

I shake like a Sunday painter‘s hand.

1.6   22.8.1985, Waironga Road, North Taieri. 1st Prize, NZ Poetry Society Competition, 1987

 


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