Lonely Bird, by H.W. Bryce

Improvisation 35, by Wassily Kandinsky (Russia). 1914

Lonely Bird
 
All the colours of chaos and smudge smear
The clear eyes of heaven and of earth
So that nothing is clear any more
And black and white is buried in the turmoil
Smeared onto the canvas of life
And man cannot recognize his mate…
But in the turmoil, the caloposy* of modern art
In the disharmony of colours arguing against blending…
                A loney bird sings.
 
Its voice rises above the cacophonic pandemonium
As the musical notes fall from their clefs
And scream in their horror of loss and abandonment…
Yet the loney bird sings, a lonely herald of hope
In a vision of renewal and peace.
Listen. Listen.
Listen to the lonely bird sing.
 
Her song is the song of hope.
Her song is the prayer of the lost children,
Of the lonely and the beaten,
And a cry for the path less taken.
 
Sing with the lonely bird
Gird your lonely loin,
Join with the colours of Hope,
Slope not away from her song.
 
For the fish in the seas lose their senses
Of navigation and distance in the reverberations
Of the swirling, howling colours and one landmark
Butts into another and one fish can no longer
Recognize another in its new and splodged colours
In this crazy mixing bowl of splish splashing
Hues and dyes,
And one by one each fish, each one dies...
 
And in the swirl and the scramble of chaos
And rewritten history repeating itself
The minds of mankind like The Scream are screaming
Out like the lost souls being sucked into
Dante’s Inferno, and the crazy painter
Splashes more colours and more...
 
And the butterflies, and the humming birds
Are not painted in but are being painted right out…
 
And the drum beat keeps skipping its beat
And the music can find its rhythm no more
And the orchestral members keep trying to
Out-loud each other in great disharmony…
 
And yet, the loney bird sings.
 
Her song is the song of hope.
Her song is the prayer of the lost children,
Of the lonely and the beaten,
And a cry for the path less taken.
 
Sing with the lonely bird,
Gird your lonely loin,
Join with the colours of Hope,
Slope not away from her song.
 
H. W. Bryce
 
*caloposy – a made up word to describe the chaos of colours (in modern art)

H. W. Bryce, BA, Western University, lives in Metro Vancouver, Canada. Former journalist, editor, book editor, teacher, courier, and robbery and kidnap victim while travelling the Middle East and North Africa, he survived near-clinical depression by writing poetry. While learning the art of caregiving to his late wife on her long goodbye Alzheimer’s journey, both his writing and his life were transformed. His poetry appears in anthologies in Canada, the US, and India. He is published in the Neworld Review. Mr. Bryce was one of three judges for the 2017 Rabindranath Tagore Award International English Poetry Competition. He is the author of a family book Ann, A Tribute, and of Chasing a Butterfly: a journey in poems of love and loss to acceptance, the poems of Alzheimer’s and poems for everybody. Mr. Bryce’s blog appears on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/herb.w.bryce He has been a featured poet and frequent contributor to many venues, and has ‘appeared’ on radio as well. Mr. Bryce is a member of the Royal City Literary Society and the Holy Wow Poets Canada.