Picture the hand that brings a canvas to life.
Layering a dance of greens and all hues of blue,
as eyes search for a land learning to sing
within the four-cornered expanse.
And those eyes looking from a safe gallery room
are silenced by the violent dyeing. Disturbed
that colours can both curse and caress,
ultramarine and cobalt stretching outwards but also back, back,
back, plaiting dandelion with turquoise and heather.
Picture her hand, a tethered bird,
swooping across the bitter, often torn blank,
placing words as petalled offerings.
Look there, the clouds are composing a word!
Perhaps the word was a song? A tentative chorus
woven by her curious hand and a brush or pen,
the brutal, the beauty began to speak.
But not all are fluent in the iaith of hills or hags or colour or crones.
Unwilling to open a different pair of eyes,
they miss the symbols she drapes lacelike,
collaging across place, across body – bronau, cefn, rhiw.
The artist’s hand parts white sheets rippling on the line,
revealing how new paintings or poems tear themselves into being.
A canvas is not a map yet routes emerge,
shaped like a hand yearning, in search of.
Hanan Issa
Bardd Cenedlaethol Cymru | National Poet of Wales