trout

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. 1^st Prize, NZ Poetry Society Competition, 1987