"Who are You? Children?" This painting was started during the idyllic summer of 2001 while I basked in the sun drenched days and intellectual bliss of the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA residency. It was completed after the horrific events of September 11, 2001 and therefore took a ominous turn. Here are five archetypes: the impish demon, the seer, the male and female hapless witnesses and the fallen doll. My poet colleague, Maj Ragain, composed a response poem, “The Ancient Ones at Trail’s End,” and ended it with these lines:
I am the sighted one.
Only I can see what is coming for us.
Our flame headed sister has fired her
last musket ball at the wounded moon.
The beasts have found the breech in the fence.
This is the time we have feared. - Maj Ragain
I interrogate myself with this painting. As I suspect most people did after those fateful events. Here follows Ragain’s complete poem:
The Ancient Ones at Trail’s End
A Response Poem to Who Are You? Children?
We are not children.
We walked out of the wood’s womb
before the first light.
We wait now at the edge of razor grass,
picketed by the wooden teeth fence.
Down the long, narrow trails,
we linked hands, the five of us,
our legs kissed by summer,
poison oak, trumpet vine, nightshade.
In the clearing, we unraveled
into who we had always been,
the heavy bucket of the skull,
the noise in the chest, the hands
that long to fly away like
strange, knuckle-winged birds,
to call back to us from treetops.
I am the sighted one.
Only I can see what is coming for us.
Our flame headed sister has fired her
last musket ball at the wounded moon.
The beasts have found the breech in the fence.
This is the time we have feared.
- Maj Ragain
