Three Poems on Van Gogh, by Kate Young

Willows at Sunset, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1888

For Theo

 My mind is grazing again.
Thoughts chafe at memory
like stubble, I feel the prickle
of rash on flesh but
cannot pluck it to hand.
 
Today, that very same hand
created chaos on canvas,
brushstrokes wild like cheetahs
chasing a frenzy of stripes,
colliding with golden orb.
 
Its light rolls in exile
toward a watery demise,
a flutter of lashes and
she will give rise to the
moon and a sleepless night.
 
Apologies, I am in need,
barely scraping through days
with stumps for limbs
truncated as the willows here,
tongues rasping for spring,
 
her gentle breath soothing
bruises on bark. But
I am a sea of wheat,
threshed before time
like an unfinished sketch.

The Haystacks, by Vincent Van Gogh (The Netherlands) 1888

A Circular Existence
  
Dearest Theo, I came for healing,
to lift the shuttered blind
from my frantic eyes
but find it was never there!
 
Golden waves bathe Auvers,
a landscape sheaved in wheat
waiting for the scythe,
such a circular existence.
 
But Theo, I am obsessed
with capturing that swirl,
the bare-backed ripple
of muscle riding air
 
as light-waves, liquid as thought,
hug a sun-blanched soil.
How can canvas and brush
deliver such resistance?
 
At noon, petticoat clouds
flirt with turquoise skies,
breakers caught by tide
pull me in, compliant.
 
A solitary reaper, so distant,
bequeaths a freedom
to the condemned,
chafed ears rubbed in dust.

Shoes, by Vincent Van Gogh (The Netherlands) 1886

Magnets in Soles
  
How many pairs have I squandered
since I stumbled across these boots
among Amsterdam’s finest oils?
Magnets in soles, I am drawn
back to leather-beaten uppers,
laces tangled as the artist’s mind.
 
I run my virtual fingers across
the rut-crusted landscape,
sense the tramp and churn of toil,
a harrow dragging a grumble of roots
from claggy soil to splintered light,
little spud-eyes lifted clear of earth.
 
I hear the sigh of workers’ breath,
their stories, wrapped in sepia-tones
tumbling from frames in a heap.
They tell of knuckles, cracked on flint,
prising blistered feet from welt,
a whisper of footfall trodden in dirt.

Kate Young

Kate Young lives in Kent, England and has been passionate about poetry since childhood. Over the last few years, she has had success with poems published in webzines in Britain and internationally. She generally writes free verse and loves responding to art through ekphrastic poems. If pushed, she would name TS Eliot as her favourite poet.  Her poems have appeared in Ninemuses, Ekphrastic Review, Nitrogen House, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake and a Scottish Writers Centre chapbook. Her work has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. The pamphlet Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite was published by Hedgehog Press in 2020 and her poems feature alongside two other poets. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet.

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