Poetry By Susan Stewart - Poem 3

The Artist’s Room – A Sestina Poem

The artist’s room reveals textures of life’s patterns.
Speckled Spanish tiles swirl to the world beyond,
Leading the eye in rhythm to the outside mysteries
Far from the cocooned closet of the inner sanctuaries.
The pen and brush produce the fleeting fantasies,
Quickly captured, combined in quilts of transient textures.

Tempted by the tapestries of tantalising textures,
Curious collections form the room’s patterns.
The artist indulges in all of the fantasies
That stretch the mind far beyond
The experiences of the silent sanctuaries
And the woven web combining mysteries.

Many a mind’s mercurial mysteries
Are revealed in a room’s tarnished textures.
Shelves full of books become sanctuaries
And baskets of brushes and painted patterns
Display the desire for a world beyond,
As materials are transformed into fruitful fantasies.

Far from the frazzled fantasies,
Fraught with the frustrations of mysteries,
Ideas form in the mind and beyond.
Repeated rhythms of terrestrial textures,
Show in perceptions of peaceful patterns
And refuge in the soulful sanctuaries.

Where can be found such sanctuaries
To escape with one’s frivolous fantasies?
Palettes of paint and photographed patterns
Birth forward the nucleus of mysteries,
And create on canvas tenuous textures
When earth’s bubble bursts beyond.

What lies in conception and beyond,
Blossoming forth from salubrious sanctuaries?
Illusive inspiration of cerebral textures,
Written illustrations of flamingo fantasies
Become a painter’s paradise of mysteries
Where prevails the pristine polished patterns.

Patterns pervade in secret sanctuaries
Beyond the realm of frivolous fantasies.
Marvellous mysteries reveal life’s tertiary textures.

Susan Stewart

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