Picturing Brazil

 

Return I will, to old Brazil. The song lingered

in my mind long past the young years when I heard it.

Now, being promised online images of art

from Brazil, my mind raced on ahead. I heard it

           again, that song; heard it wailing, in old longing

           for a land unknown: my fanciful own longing.

But the pictures that I found were made by a man

visiting from Holland. A few he created 

there in Brazil; others he remembered later,

transposing them onto a Dutch landscape – created,

           it seems, to hide wildness (though there too is the sea,

           which completes any country’s beauty: the untamed sea).

Brazil, in my imagination, is varied.

In contrast, I picture just flatness in Holland.

I have never travelled to either in my life.

(I once married a Dutchman, but not in Holland.)

           I wanted the paintings to show me a Brazil

  full of colour and spice, my old dream of Brazil.

NaPoWriMo Day Thirteen

(Using an unnamed verse form, evidently invented by Donald Justice.)