House Painting 

 

 It’s the smell that draws you in:

a sweet heady burn of time,

reeking the prehistory of pine forests.

 

He stirs and mixes 

flax oil and wood tar.

Viscous years fill a plastic cauldron,

 

bleeding blackened amber 

towards a coagulation 

blending harvest and cremation.

 

This is dockyard work,

the house grounded and anaesthetised 

in its summer interregnum,

 

ready to receive a new skin

against the flaying storms to come.

Each brushstroke stretches sinews

 

and drags coalblack darkness down,

plank after plank coated in honeyed gloom,

strophe after sticky strophe of a seaswept ballad.

 

He steps back to view,

then further back

to an age of oars and calloused hands.

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Daniel Rye is a poet and musician living in Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands. His poetry has appeared in online and print journals, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry.

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