Artist

A Poem by Rom

Inside my mother
There's an art exhibition
I am the artist.

You see the first painting on the wall
Of a tiny sapling with clouds all over the sky raining
That's from the day I was born
If you look closely
You can see my mother's face on the clouds.

The painting of a tree spreading out its branches in different directions?
That's from my first day at school.

The one where the tree bears the reddest of apples?
It's from the time I hit puberty

My mother takes a walk through the exhibition everyday
Her eyes scanning each painting like they are her most precious children.
My mother, she treats those walls like a trophy
Something to hold high up in the air and wait for the world to notice it.
She takes every compliment
Every appraisal
A pat on the back
Moulds them into medals
And wears them around her neck.

I am her favourite artist.

Today when I hand her a painting
Of a tree with its leaves being eaten by insects crawling out from the soil,
It's branches resembling corpses dug up from the soil
She does not hang it on the wall
She says she does not understand it.

In the next painting the branches of the tree have turned into weeds,
They have wrapped themselves around its trunk
The insects continue to increase in number
Getting fatter each day
The clouds are still raining but somehow they fail to reach the soil.
It is always dry and cracking
Falling apart
The surrounding is so dark you can almost feel the tree suffocating.

My mother stops visiting the exhibition.
I am no longer her favourite artist.
The exhibition has turned into a museum,
It's walls haunted by history
Everything around it dead and decaying.

There are no medals around her neck now.

I stop painting.

My mother stops looking me in the eye
She's afraid that if she does, I will look too much like the trees in those paintings.

But inside my mother's exhibition
There's a room nobody knows about
A room filled with paintings that could not find their place on the walls.

Sometimes I see my mother locked in the room
Her hands shaking as she picks up a paintbrush for the first time
Trying to turn the insects in the paintings into caterpillars
Which she hopes will one day turn into butterflies,
Something beautiful.

My mother tries
I know she does

So I do not remind her that even caterpillars feed on leaves.

I let her be

Maybe one day
when she lets me inside the room
I will teach her how to hold a paintbrush properly
And we'll paint something
Together
And this time
I'll make sure
That the rain reaches the soil.