Jacinta Painting Under Trees

for Jacinta O’Reilly, (Annaghmakerrig, Easter, 2015)

Jacinta is painting under trees,
capturing every note of the birds’ song
on a canvas that is netting the spring air.
From here, she is a child or a 1950s mother
hauling out a quilt to dry on the clothes line,
something deemed unseemly now for gardens.
My mother saw a full line of bright white nappies
flapping in the wind, the pristine fruit of her morning.
Jacinta hangs her work from the trees on Easter branches,
buds ready to burst, daffodils smears of yellow in the grass,
a black bird scuffling among the dead leaves of the beech hedge.

Jacinta leaves the painting out on the grass overnight and tends it 

with a blue bucket in the morning. Is she adding to it or plucking 

off what it has snared? The stray feathers of a crow or a bee
that has trespassed in the paint? Perhaps the course hair 

of a puzzled creature that sniffed it and this minute 

carries off the colour to its lair? When this painting 

hangs, will it hold the outside in? Does it know
it is en plein air? I have never seen a painter 

work like this and envy her the chance 

to play which is surely what art is. 

Jacinta is painting under trees.

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poem courtesy of Maureen Boyle © 2015

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