Art, As Life

I know I've used this photograph before for a different post, but I love Picasso's Guernica.  Today's offering is a poem about the piece of art itself:

Guernica
(Picasso’s sorrow)
by Nicole Speulda


Was your blood black and blue
politics as art, art as life
public cause painted in private
sensibility in black and gray?

History is a paintbrush
a discovery and rediscovery
forced to forget and relearn again,
the colours of the national mood
cut from the sharpness of your veins.

Paint brush daggers
in pointed anger left to dry,
a jagged soiling of canvas
in contextual subjectivity.

Are people like nations
myths of the subconscious
alive in the shadow of art
shaped by physical psychosis?

Were you painting your sorrows
as Hamlet’s pitched words
recording the hubris of memory
mixing images of social collectivity
bodies mangled between strokes,
in creative distortion, perhaps
keeping the pace of real time?

Beware the colours of your palette.