Edited and introduced by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc.
Jeffrey Thomson lives in Farmington with his wife and son and teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington. He is also a world traveler and a naturalist, spending time regularly in Costa Rica and many other places.
This poem arises out of his time as a Fulbright scholar in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It reminds us how in some places a violent history lurks below the surfaces of everyday life. And it reminds us how nature’s transformations can hold some element of violence within them.
You might also notice that Thomson’s poem is one long sentence that pushes us headlong down the page toward that “seedpod ready to explode.”
Watercolor Painting Class,
Northern Ireland
By Jeffrey Thomson
Once a week above the rooftops
of Queen’s Quarter – skylights
and chimneypots providing
the order the eye asks for – inside
an old girls school turned studio
where I was the youngest student
in a class retired long ago from
daily life in Belfast, checkpoints
and rifles, parades and old enemies
in mask and balaclava, pressure
of a city mounting toward the fires
of July, I worked my morning into
gardens of amaryllis and lily,
small pastoral welcome of geese
among outbuildings gray and streaked
as the rain crashed its shrapnel
on the exhaust vents for the kilns,
and, one day, as the sky crawled by
in its uniform of grim and somber,
I painted a close-up of the small star
of a sunflower with all the colors
of the light I’d missed that winter,
filling the canvas with warm petals
of citron and blonde, champagne
and canary, and, at the heart of it all,
the black of the seedpod ready to explode.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. This column is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Jeffrey Thomson. It appears here by permission of the author.
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