Second Place!

Before you get too excited about my achieving second place with my chalk painting last Saturday in Moreno Valley, it was a very small field of competitors.  I also had a small booth at the art fair and my beloved was being the store keeper for me, while I wore off my fingerprints.  I discovered fairly early on that our choice of space to set up (chosen because putting Doug under the tree in the shade would allow me to use the umbrella to keep the blacktop I was working on from melting my fingers), was in front of the band.  The band (there were several during the course of the day) and the between-bands background music was LOUD.  So, to relieve Doug and allow him to walk around and repair his eardrums and sanity, I hurried through my work.

The need for speed was exacerbated by wind which took the umbrella for a tumble and meant I had to chalk with one hand while quickly rubbing the chalk into the now-scorching blacktop with the other.  I finished in 2 hours, and apparently was the only one who completely finished, though other chalkers, intending to take until 4pm created larger compositions.

I had a limited amount of blue, so did the surrounding ‘atmosphere’ in red, rather than follow the original, and created far less clouds than on the mixed media painting this was based on. For this it’s more about the message than the accuracy of the map.

“That the world is round reminds us that we are on the same side.”

I’ve spent years mulling over this poem.

I feel that I finally got it right.  Questions on the back of a comment if you don’t get the symbolism in the first two verses and would like to know what it means…..

Tribe

First the mirror,
then blood.

The heart beats stronger
than the tree grows
on the land if there are few of you,
yet the skin is more tactile
than the cloth;
the tongue
louder than the book, which is
more vocal than the anvil.

We run ourselves ragged
in the circles in which
we think we move,
tripping over ankle-height
revolving cogs
intersecting and grinding,
snarling with different grooves
forcing us to question
our motives,
your reasons,
everyone’s voices
until we are dizzy with
the mesmer of conficts.

We cry out
‘where is our tribe?’
But the tears on the mirror
obscure our true selves,
our image
and everything behind it,
fizzling into a formless haze,
blinding us so we no longer see
we should be
we are
we cannot continue unless
we become one.