Solidarity
For Bill
Delete him from
the story of the world,
restart, and find
missing as well
the wild pansies,
plums and firefish,
apatura iris
fluttering over fields
of lupine and foxglove,
sea star and amethyst,
honeycreeper tag
through jacaranda trees,
columbine colonies
hiding in shadows
of mountains at twilight,
the innermost band
of every rainbow’s
ancient promise,
every John Doe,
every solace.
A Word About the Poem: This ekphrastic (language responding to image) poem speaks to the image in Tom Matousek’s painting above entitled “Kairos” (see more on the painting below). The poem’s title adopts the word “solidarity”, a concept front and central in the current national conversation about race, and utilizes it to suggest the mysterious connectedness of all life, imagining that the loss of one person in the world (in this case a nameless, homeless, elderly black gentleman) causes the concurrent loss of a whole network of connected realities. Because Tom has chosen to use purple in many shades as the representative color of this character, I imagine that this person’s violent loss (deletion) by the swipe of some capricious wand is simultaneously causing the loss of all sorts of beautiful “purple” realities in the world, including the dismantling of the rainbow, which heightens our sense of alienation from the idea of divine security, amplified in every anonymous person’s loss, stealing life from all of us (“solidarity” in its deepest sense). This poem is an echo of John Donne’s famous lines, “Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
A Word from the Artist: We all come in different sizes, shapes and colors and everyone of us is important and necessary for the completion and beauty of the overall picture. I’ve left one block permanently unpainted to demonstrate this, in the shape of a sideways tear below his right eye. My first thought was to paint George Floyd and, while we should not and will not ever forget him and the countless other lives taken too soon, for this exercise, I wanted to try to help focus our attention forward and on how we view one another. So I painted a man who is homeless and whose name is unknown in hopes that, if he ever saw this painting, he would feel joyful knowing that his image is the subject of something beautiful and that his role is important and valuable in the big picture. I call this painting ‘Kairos,’ and it’s a tribute to Bill. —Tom Matousek