A contemplation of two drawings – Rebecca Brewin

A Contemplation of Two Drawings
Black Swan Arts Centre, Frome

1. Judgement and Confidence by J’Azaria Kay – aged 17
2. Street Collage by Barnaby Turner – aged 15

You may look down on my skin-surface
From your suspended and shuttered eyes,
But you are blind to what is in front of me;
Me who (still) looks for pattern, for faces in any thing,
(Like a child), an alien in this flat world of squares.

I exist alongside the cardboard cut-out
(Wendy House) box and square of the buildings,
The gridlock of streets that claim my belonging;
The rooms of my youth, where the ceilings were too high,
The floors too cold, the portraits dark and looming,
The ancestry tangible.

Yet, at heart, I am a traveller…
I live on wheels.
The wheels turn and spin along the tarmac,
So that the squares of brick and mortar,
The glaring windows and glassy shop fronts,
Become a welcome blur…

Here I can live inside my circular world
Of pattern, spiral, kaleidoscope –
The (grandmother’s) wallpaper and plates
That I carry in my skin,
Like the henna hand-markings of India.

Here the cobwebs of dark
Are safe to me
In the lit warmth of my mobile home.
The uniformity fades
As the love that lives in spirals
Is born out of the open wound.

The wound of no belonging
Is re-named as the pattern of pilgrimage;
The blind-spot emerging
As the open road.

Rebecca Brewin