Van Gogh's Good Friday Poem by Paul du Plessis

One candle extinguished
While another flickers
Over the emptiness of a chair
Vacated in the loneliness
Of collegial treachery.

Olive trees anguished
With clouds emptied
As tears of the Kidron
Weep over injury inflicted
By pharisaic torture.

Isaiah collapses
Under an osteoporotic spine
So we can forget
Why the servant died
For our transgressions.

All nature joins
In the sadness of Calvary
As the creation rebels
At the attack on their maker
By intellectual torment.

Trees truncated
Out of the land of the living
Sprout again
Gently endowed
With resurrection triumph.

April 2010

On visiting The Real van Gogh – The Artist and His Letters at The Royal Academy of Arts, London.