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