Naive Art

Jan 16 2013

Children of the Depression
like my frugal parents
accumulate things.
High-ceilinged, over-heated,
old apartments groan
with china figurines, prized collectibles,
the sentimental stuff
of lives, well-lived.

They would like for us
to claim it, when they're gone,
little treasures
with which to take
their measure,
keep memory alive.
As if some small part
however small
might survive.

Or not.
Because my mother gives a knowing shrug
as she bustles about the place,
dusting, re-arranging
neatening-up.
Sensibly resigned
to obsolescence,
indifferent descendants
who just as well might rent
a hulking dumpster,
clear all of it
out.
The modern aesthetic
of less.

But there's a single painting
I'd gladly claim.
Over-powering the room
it irresistibly lures
the eye,
a tropical, succulent
lushly colourful
moving life.
By some obscure Haitian artist,
so clearly out of place
in this glacial winter,
monochrome white.

A family story
comes with it.
That it was won, by my mother
at some raffle, or other,
not knowing she had just
won the right to buy.
But my father indulged her
dug deep, paid up;
if not a lover of art
then a temperate man's
undemonstrative love.
A party of two,
who made their own good luck
come true.

They call this primitivist art,
as if a child
could have done.
Which is why I love this piece.
Because it proclaims you can choose
to be naive.
Grow old, but refuse
to grow up.
Never lose the wonder
of a world that once
was new.