You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,
a prayer like paper. The light illumined all our sacred trees.
Somehow, we forgot all our raucous and joyous past love
when I asked you to listen for the screen door’s slam
and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.
And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:
so many similar dark faces filled with joy.
Then I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,
a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough glowing bronze skin.
You said it was a portrait of your brother,
who died overseas during a rain of fire in the Viet Nam war.
And you put down your brushes to confess
we are going to start life all over again
without waging the private wars that keep us together.
You painted your dead brother’s face
against a background of blue.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has been recognized by the Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, The Writer’s Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poetry and reviews have been published in numerous literary and scholarly journals.
the Decolonial Passage 