Mountains in Summer

After a painting by Van Gogh

Landscape from Saint-Rémy, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, via Wikimedia

On a day like today the billowing 
clouds swoop down over the blue-green mountains
like curtains blown into a room. The fields 
billow too, waving their wild green and gold 
waves-- you can hear their sighs through the open 
window where you lean on the sill and welcome
the wind's soft caresses, the warm smell of 
sun-baked dirt, grain, grass, and the twitterings
of swallows swooping high above the world.
Your heart swells, fills like a sail and you lift,
fly, over the sill, into the summer sky.
You, the swallows, the clouds, swirl together
over the mountains, higher and higher
into the endless waves of burning blue. 

---

With the coming of summer and our trip to Maine, my already-disintegrating writing habits fell away completely. But last night I started to feel that itch of wanting to write a poem. I didn’t have any ideas for lines or images or anything, just the itch, the desire to do the work. Once, I wouldn’t have known what to do with that itch and would have floundered around flailing at inspiration and probably not found any. But now I know some good places to start. One of them is art.

So I went to my sister’s Facebook page and started scrolling. She is always posting beautiful art and I know she loves getting poetry in her comments. So I have something to trigger some lines, an audience to write for, and very low stakes. My goal is to find an image and leave a few lines. They don’t have to become a great poem, just a little gift for my sister.

The Van Gogh calls to me immediately. He’s a reliable friend who usually gives me a helping hand. It’s the soft white clouds with the deep blue shadows that really draw me in: so cool and inviting after we’ve just suffered through one of the hottest days on record.

After our recent sojourn in the mountains of coastal Maine my brain is full of mountain thoughts and images, and also images of the ocean with its pounding waves and rolling fog. All of those spill over into the painting. As do the swallows that my daughter delights in pointing out to me. When I realized the poem needed the sound of birdsong, it was Bella’s swallows that wanted to be swooping above Van Gogh’s fields.

Then the sounds gave the poem shape. It wanted all those long vowels and repeated S and W sounds. Sound builds on sound echoing in my brain, dancing on my tongue. And suddenly there it is.