Homecoming

The Bridge

  oil on panel  7" x 9"

Homecoming

by W.S. Merwin

Once only when the summer

was nearly over and my own

hair had been white as the day's clouds

for more years than I was counting

I looked across the garden at evening 

Paula was still weeding around

flowers that open after dark

and I looked up to the clear sky

and saw the new moon and at that

moment from behind me a band

of dark birds and then another

after it flying in silence

long curving wings hardly moving

the plovers just in from the sea

and the flight clear from Alaska

half their weight gone to get them home

but home now arriving without

a sound as it rose to them

I was looking at this painting and wondering about the appeal of the place where I painted it. Something my sister observed about it, that it looked welcoming - kind of the idea of a house on the hill beyond the gateway, I think. Then, this morning, I was reading an email I get every day that always starts with a poem and there was "Homecoming", by the American poet W.S. Merwin. Though written in a different place and of his personal experience, the poem and maybe my little painting, speak to what connects us all as humans - the love of arriving where we're welcome; the artists' acute observations of small things that build up a larger pattern; the way art can show us these things while allowing us to recognize them for ourselves. Guess that's what it is supposed to be all about - making art and living attuned to such moments. Enjoy!