(for Karen Westendorf)
Inside a grey stone box there is a warning not to open the white box inside it because of the horrors it contains:
the staging of a killing á la Goya by children, another child in the foreground looks askance, and a baby lies like a rag on the ground;
a production with a man wearing a mask with a hare’s ears, a girl in a ballerina’s dress rising from the earth, a bound hostage on the ground, and trees hacked down to stumps;
a scene with a man of the lineage of Otto Dix on crutches, one leg missing, and a Mother Courage of a woman collecting limbs from bodies;
and, as if seen through a door ajar but squarely, the heads of a man and a woman imprisoned together, their faces shrivelled by spitting words, their tongues nearly touching but not in a kiss, tension in the intensity of black on white but no red yet –
the eye of the artist a prism, chrism of experience.
‘Dinggedicht: Ysgythriadau Marcelle Hanselaar’ Mary Burdett-Jones 2023
© copyright text and translation Mary Burdett-Jones 2023