As the New Year arrives
wars are raging on two
or three continents,
minor skirmishes that
rarely make the headlines
erupt in a half dozen places.
From Ukraine to Israel to Gaza
sieges, famines, massacres.
The world is becoming frayed
and some days seems to
fracture into pieces.
Day after day people
check the list of the dead
in search of familiar names.
A child doesn’t care
if he dies by a knife, gun,
indiscriminate bomb,
or starves to death.
Europe was awash
in wars of violence,
cruelty that lasted decades,
the Thirty-Year War, the Eighty-Year War.
Yet in your paintings everything
is clean, bright, and perfectly composed,
radiating a peacefulness and serenity,
far different from the reality outside the room.
The French invasion of 1672,
known as the disaster year
devastated the economy
and collapsed the art market.
Was it too much to endure?
How did you cope with
the heart ache of a world
falling into ruin?
Skeletons are never far away.
We continue to unearth bones
from beneath the rubble
of collapsed buildings and
sometimes we sleep above them.
Their ghosts inhabit our dreams.
Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including: The Map Is Not the Territory, Just Enough, Listening to Tao Yuan Ming, The Things I Notice Now, The Faces of Guan Yin and Windows. Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017.
