! Spring Afternoon Poem by Michael Shepherd

A spring morning – well,
I only need to say the words?
I’ll picture mine, you picture yours –
champagne bubbling in the blood and in the mind,
hopes and possibilities flooding freshly in..

but a spring mid-afternoon… like today, like now:
a subtle balance of the elements;
the sunlight bathes the room, but gently,
with its promise; yet,
there’s a timeless peace with it
that’s like a life surveyed; yet
free of thought, of comparison, or of regret:

the six loved paintings that adorn the walls
bought for a song, when art was like a song –
they love the gentle sunlight, and it in turn loves them;
five artists painting their sunlit peace, their happiness;
(two very different ones from the man
who lives so humbly halfway up
the mountain hills he rambles every day):
three oils; one gouache; one watercolour; and one pastel;

they all but two have clouds in them
as they’re all landscapes;
one that hasn’t, has a haze as if
the painter’s painting the summer wind, in those high hills..
the other is a cloudless morning’s peace,
the bend of a river in mid-France;
the river…it cannot be, just painted oil?
it’s water seen as by a pure clear soul…

and the clouds – caught in an impossibility of time,
play out an endless drama of the elements;
timeless in the peace of, now, a slightly later
springtime afternoon; almost with a touch...
but how could perfection ever regret
its own departure?