Poem of the Week

Tricking the Light

07/08/2022

Life is filled with repetition, absurdity, and futility. In the language of psychiatry capgras syndrome, here one sees his doubles everywhere. The double could be defined as sameness after distillation in the normal sense. Maurice Devitt has depicted these things in a painter's brush stroke metaphor. He shuffles, stealthily, off guard in search of adventure and novel surprise, but he remains unsurprised. I like the tree near the window; it reminds me of the stoic’s stand.

Tricking the Light

By Maurice Devitt

He paints in a room at the top of the house

and every morning climbs the arthritic stairs,

one creak at a time,

pauses for a breather on the attic return,

then softly shuffles up the final few steps.

He ascends in total darkness,

as if to catch the room off-guard

and, as his eyes take in the sooty shift

from night to day, he sees

that everything is just as he left it –

the tree he has painted through the window

every day for thirty years, is still there

to reveal the lies in yesterday’s work,

so he starts the story one more time,

not knowing how it will end.

Bio: Maurice Devitt is a past winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions, he published his debut collection, ‘Growing Up in Color’, with Doire Press in 2018.

Curator of the Irish Center for Poetry Studies site, his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015.

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Editor’s Pick is a poem curated by founding editor Arc Magazine, Dr. Pragya Suman. It is the weekly column and each Sunday a new poem.