Off The Page~ a multimedia exploration of painting, poetry, storytelling and music
Little Sister is a response painting to Maj Ragain's poem, Winter for Skylark. Ragain includes a memory:
....At the old Shields cemetery,
southeast of Olney,
a flowering patch of Dragon’s Blood
blankets the grave of a child,
every spring/
I saw this child once,
when I was six, as I was walking
home from Shields school,
past the cemetery.
She stood by the iron gate,
naked, thin as willow,
the color of lime water.
She covered her small breasts
with her hands.
She pleaded for something I couldn’t hear./
This is the voice
I have been listening for, all these years.
It is the voice this poem wants to speak with.
How to make a mouth under the Dragon’s Blood.
Maj Ragain. Burley One Dark Sucker Fired: Collected Poems Working Lives Series, Bottom Dog Press. Huron, OH, 1998, p.48
Damen, Jessica & Ragain, Maj, Home To Sargasso Sea-A Long Journey of Loving Collaboration, exhibition catalog, June 1-July 14, 2018, KSU Downtown Gallery, Kent OH, Kent State University School of Art Collection and Galleries and the Wick Poetry Center with support from the Ohio Arts Council. pp 36-37