A Story or Two for the Artist

Here are links to two stories I've read (or re-read) this week that touched a nerve in my artist's soul. If you have the time I highly encourage you to read them.

Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid

and

Nathanial Hawthorne's The Artist of the Beautiful

Create beautiful things this week.

Bird Song

Your song drifts over the stale stillness,

Sharp and shrill, mutilating my mind

With sweet, sad remembrances of death.

Did not Keats hear your refrain and mourn

The power of its persistent pulse

And Shelly laud your lilting lullaby?

Your beauty is a calloused curse,

Maligned by festering falsehoods.


Unheard oracle, you sing, oblivious

To the smothering grip of mindlessness.

Since Poe first foretold Diana's death

The earth swells with neglected truths

Ignored by survival's endless strain.

With a catechism of promise,

Cataloged with false fragmented facts,

We prey on the deaf starvation of your voice.



Bleeding, blistering with light, I listen,

Terrified by the intensity of my homage.

Scraps of soul drift in the scalding dust,

Destined to dampen my memory.

Hollow chasms echo with your cries,

Murdering silence with manacles

Forged with our own forgetfulness and

The remains of your rejected hymn.

Blank Page

A blank page stares at me like a hungry cat.

Fear clogged passages clamor for words,

Fogged with the dusty noise of my past.


Old dreams hum to me in forgotten lullabies

The relentless dance of thought churns in my head,

Hidden from reality by repetition.


If I could bleed ink I would let it drip.

I would smear it across the page

Until the chatter was drowned.


If my lips were silent,

If my mind were still,

Could I form a word?