Vision to Verse:Collaboration with Maj Ragain, poet
&Quick River In A Green Time% is part response to Boticelli’s Three Graces and part response to Maj Ragain's poem,For My Daughter Meg, Graduating From Kent Roosevelt High School. I play with the idea of adolescence as a time filled with perilous creatures, fast white water rafting,a Rumpelstiltskin character and chained expectations as well as fruitful opportunities. One sees transition: a sport's clad graceful girl, a green sinewy girl, a come hither Venus floating on a scallop shell. There are many more references to fairy tale and myth to find.
&Quick River In A Green Time% by Maj Ragain
Monarch butterflies find their way,
through days and nights and storms, across the gulf to winter, sleeping in the dark trees of Mexico.
No map. They know where home is.
Look for your teachers.
They have come a long way to meet you.
An old woman who talks to the wind.
A child who weeps and draws pictures in the dirt. A beautiful young man, his face painted
in colors you’ve never seen.
The teacher may not be a person,
but a storm that carries away your house,
a blossoming dogwood that walks about
while you sleep.
Love and death are wondrous gif ts. Few open them.
Don’t fail to open the gif ts.
Your actions are your only true belongings.
Nothing else is yours.
Be a love dog. Howl for what you love. Refuse the chain, the fence,
the little house that keeps you
from the rain.
You are a quick river in a green time, finding your way to a great sea
that will call to you all your life. Never forget you begin somewhere in the mountains, far to the north where snow and sky join.