pressed behind
a soft-edged glass block
is the young girl you inquired about
her small face locked in terror
was painted years before
her screams captured
an unkind photograph her despair on fire
thick with oils and the scent of a
violent turperntine
and pressed against the thick, icy wall
she lives, small locked deep
within a belly’s canyon where hunger endless
rains down trying to fill her already-overflowing
and stuffed…
save me, she whispers on occasion
words caught in stale, aging air still thick with remembrance
while munch’s fine portrait of her
graces the museum of a captor’s lost and neglected soul
‘We want more than a mere photograph of nature. We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing- room walls. We want to create, or at least lay the foundations of, an art that gives something to humanity…An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one’s innermost heart.’ Edvard Munch