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