Thank you to Editor Shahadat Hossain Shaan for publishing this poem in The Local Train Magazine.



Giovanni Antonio Guardi, “The Healing of Tobias’s Father”, c. 1750
(courtesy of The Local Train Magazine)

Apocryphal Painting

The sky torn and repatched with tools
constructed from sorrowful rain.
This sham artist has left
the world poorly explained.

An apocryphal painting,
varnished images wrecked,
set upon fragile easels,
chipped pigment now takes effect.

Creeping blemishes below clouds,
leaving the splattered canvas dark,
with neither hope nor signature,
man’s, not nature’s work.