Photograph by Amy Hart
The night my brother thinks
he’s going to die
he paints the head of Christ
spiked with thorns.
Harsh yellows, blacks, and greens
against a sky
weeping for Jerusalem.
My sibling dares
to conquer art,
the ticking clock.
And oh the eyes that strike
the guilty heart
with each slashed line
of black.
The truth is he’s still here
years later.
Like Lazarus told not yet,
he doesn’t know quite
what to make of it.
Yet clearly he believes
he heard an owl
interrogate the night,
Donne’s tolling bell.
Those ghostly sounds
linger in the paint.
Like brooms of death
they lean against the wall.
They wait.
Elisabeth Murawski: This poem springs from growing up in a sometimes terrifying household. I write because I have to, can’t not. There is a degree of healing that takes place in confronting a homelife I had difficulty in understanding at the time I lived through and survived it. Poetry as prism.