The artwork for today is posted on Paul Brookes’ blog here, along with all the poetry it inspired.

Parents

Their house was low, thick with stone mullioned windows
that defended against the scarce light, cold and pale.

Fires blazed in the grate well into spring,
started again before summer was truly over.

She baked and cooked and painted, created with silks
and oils and watercolours, painted her garden with flowers.

He read and wrote and papered the inside of his melancholy head
with longings and regrets that stretched back centuries.

She dug and coaxed colour and life from the nut-shells
of seeds, looked always ahead to their flowering.

He sailed his paper boats backwards, into the wind
over the hills, the curling waves, cliffs black beneath the gorse.

They’re both gone now. I hope she tied him tight enough
with woodbine, so he could haul them both home.