Directives To a Great Painter I Mostly Admire, by Crystal Condakes Karlberg

Boy and Girl on a Hillside, by Winslow Homer (USA). 1878.

Directives To a Great Painter I Mostly Admire
                
Her dress is suggestive of 
nothing. Why bother? 
The pink is dingy, the blue almost grey. 
Your colours are bleeding me. I hate them 
like leeches! I hate them
like bowls of blood in Victorian novels.

Pick a new palette, for God’s sake,
for my sake, for the girl, for the boy
whose thoughts are honey. Put some colour
back in their cheeks. Where are the ripe
red berries at their feet? Have you 
never been in love? 

The leaves on the trees
should be bright green. I worry
for your eyes and your heart.
What is this moss, this olive, this toad,
all shade and wilted grass, a stone 
wall the colour of dried bones? 

Fold up the umbrella of your sadness
and hurl it into the sea! This hillside 
is no place for an elegy. Paint them
a new story, a new life, use
your fingers if you have to,
claw your way into the light.

Crystal Condakes Karlberg

Crystal Condakes Karlberg: "I'm a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. I recently went back to school to get certified to teach Middle School English. I have had work published in The Prompt; spoKe; Tupelo Quarterly; Mom Egg Review (this poem was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize); Best New Poets 2015."