Day 22. Peace
“Peace” 20×16, oil on unstretched canvas
Here’s another in my unstretched canvas series. This one, a reflection on peace in the image of a Roseate Spoonbill carrying something of an olive branch. It, like yesterday’s, will become available next week once I’ve figured out how to frame the loose canvas.
I was thinking about the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who I was probably initially drawn to when I discovered him in my 20s because of our shared last name and then later because his poem “Pied Beauty” I always found so moving in its praise of the multi-colored, speckled, diverse creatures that inhabit this earth. I have borrowed some of the adjectives from his poem to finish my own. It still feels very much like a work in progress, but so too, I think, is the work of peace.
Prayer for Peace
Huddled in
crowded arks
we give names
to seas whose depths
we cannot know
and storms
we’ve manufactured
Come, peace
In nameless sky
weightless, unbound
Bridge this gulf
earth and heaven–
resplendent, shining
all unleashed, pied things:
counter, original,
spare, and
strange
Denise Hopkins
January 22, 2025
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