In Light of The Potato Eaters
“I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those same hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor and of how they have honestly earned their food.” —Vincent van Gogh
Their drama is played out in wordless harmony
(like yours and mine, now that we talk no more).
Their meal is a symphony of simplicity.
Their dark, luxuriant mouths and noses make me
think of Africans, though these are Dutch peasants
(life is tinged with Africa, my own Greek blood fairly
sings of it).
This study hints at the grim blood Vincent would be
shedding with the bullet. This study of poor peasants
pouring their barley coffee, cutting their potatoes,
tasting silence in the dim room suffers me to know
that I will go on digging deep into dirt, hoarding
these words, stocking this tongue
till it tells some truth. Vincent let his blood many times
before the bullet—now I bleed & sweat bullets
at the brow, laboring to stretch ink
across blank pages, eating words like potatoes,
mining you for some treasure I sense I lost somewhere
in the dusk-tinted past—God knows how many times.
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