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The Canvas of War
Lesley Kimball, a frequent reader at the monthly Hoots at Café
Espresso, here turns
to the strict form of the villanelle to free a passionate response to painful truths:
The Canvas of War, Vancouver Art Gallery
The paintings of war show dead and dying trees
standing sentinel over men, chaos and fire.
The wounding of the world should bring us to our knees.We've come to see what such art achieves:
bare, tangled limbs pantomiming a funeral pyre.
The paintings of war show dead and dying trees.Frame after frame, the air grows still with our unease;
dead landscapes cradle bodies, uniformed in the mire.
The wounding of the world should bring us to our knees.To which gods can we appeal, what offer to appease
their vengeful spirits? Gods of war or art or higher?
The paintings of war show dead and dying trees.Yes, soldiers too, dead and dying, who seize
our gaze and seem to cry through the haze as a choir:
The wounding of the world has brought us to our knees.No patriotic speeches here; pain and paint frees
us from rhetoric, exposing the lie and the liar.
The paintings of war show dead and dying trees.
The wounding of the world will bring us to our knees.
-- Lesley Kimball
This poem adheres to the demands of the form as fixed by Jean
Passerat in the 16th century. The villanelle was originally pastoral; here the pasture is
on fire. The highly organized, systematic construction of the poem parallels and
accentuates its subject matter: the highly organized, systematic destruction of war. The
first and third lines break formation, only to reform at lines 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 & 19.
The end sounds of lines 1 & 2 scurry to join the next five divisions. So too each
frame unfolds in structured fashion to offer views of just where Johnny is marching to:
hell. The trees are dying. The soldiers are crying. Bodies-in uniform-are sinking into the
mire. This is war: flesh peeling from bone, nature charred to a waste land. No platitudes
here. Only "pain and paint"-and the poet's words-exposing the political lie.
-- JP
"The Canvas of War, Vancouver Art Gallery" copyright 2004 by Leslie Kimball.
Leslie is Director of the Wiggin Memorial Library in Stratham. She was a finalist in the
Voice & Vision project.
Note: Poems from The Poetry Hoot should not
exceed nineteen lines.
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