A Familiar Solitude, Textiles, Metal and Stones, 9′ x 3′, 2017
A Familiar Solitude
by Heather Gentleman
It is a familiar solitude
An agony of existence
A life wrenched out of a murky chaos
Her mouth tries to form a cry
But she only forms a whisper
She writes on the wall with one hand but her other brushes it aside
Riparare la sua casa
The house is in ruins
In her dreams she follows a child who is tired and thirsty, down winding streets
She is covered in mud and carries a mosaic of a childhood lost
In a Bell Jar
She seeks shelter but has no home
Her memory is a tyrant
Her ruined lovers
Her lost childhood
Her severed hands
Her phantom limbs
Under the ceiling of oblivion she enters a cave
She has pawned her last song
Her body is in tatters
She tightens the noose of lonely solitudes
And remembers the silence of her squandered songs
Deep in the mud
Her hands, her holy sacredness plant a seed
A thick husk
Its lips in the earth
The blackness of the soil joining the threads of her hands
Terra sustenance : beauty, dark truth emerges
One in the darkness
Created in the blackness
A lamp in the abyss
The space in which it stands lies the destiny of the seed
She places her silver glove in butterfly wings
Heather Gentleman 