👁️ Look Below 👁️
For artist Leonard Jubenville, on the occasion of his life’s retrospective exhibition, ‘What Lies Beneath’, Thames Art Gallery (January, 2023).
Look below and see the glow, workings of a world rich and full.
Absorbed beneath the visible, sheen of this evolving floe
Genesis of new life, labouring dark and birthing light.
Look below and see the glow, workings of a world rich and full.
A river bank, a complex womb, forging, feeding
through the opaque gloom.
Look below and see the glow, workings of a world rich and full.
Beneath green pears, lie limpid brown; ripening fruit and Summer’s down.
Sun-dried laundry covers warm, moist soap scented of the foundry’s mint.
Look below and see the glow, workings of a world rich and full.
Fall leaves foster fresh new shoots - amaryllis, gladioli
and velvet suits.
Across the furrowed fields evolve, the living gestating resolve.
Look below and see the glow, workings of a world rich and full.
Seams left on a marble snowscape, guide us to our Winter’s feed.
As it is, beneath the surface, in all dark patches of our sphere –
everything important lies below the toiling gloss of rich and full.