Renegades, by Robbie Chesick

​Renegades

after A Bigger Grand Canyon, by David Hockney (England) 1998

I’ll tell you what my tears are about 
after I tell you about my aunt
who came to me while mesmerized 
before the sixty canvasses 
of David Hockney’s Bigger Grand Canyon.
Like him, my aunt still paints all day
half blind, walnuts for joints. 
Unlike him, she is not a rainbow. 
I am. 
Not in the way of Hockney, 
whose brush transmutes land and change 
into persimmon and fuchsia and gold. 
I am more of a conventional rainbow,
the refracted splendour of a renegade ray
bending across the eastern sky behind you 
while you face west, paralyzed 
before the dark bruise of a coming storm.

Robbie Chesick 

Robbie Chesick (she/her) lives in Vancouver, BC, on unceded Coast Salish territory. A recently retired clinical counsellor, she spends her time tuning into surprise, sinking into connection, playing with a bow and arrow, volunteering at a raptor refuge, and meditating.  Her poetry has been published in Vallum Magazine, Poetry Pause, Event, Dusie, Prairie Fire, and the HC5 chapbook Brine.