Shanta Acharya

 

L'ATELIER ROUGE

 

After ‘The Red Studio’, a painting by Henri Matisse

 

You painted the studio a radiant scarlet –

a luminous sunset

spreading joy with increasing abandonment.

 

The glass is empty, but not your plate.

Absorbed in your creations, I wait

thinking you will walk in any moment

share secret stories of paintings on paintings.

 

Uncovering the blue and yellow beneath the red,

I note the walls were white,

you changed the colours until they felt right.

 

Your signature is everywhere,

the way you fit everything to make a whole –

 

woman and man, earth and sky,

tree like a human body,

human body like a cathedral,

studio like a private universe.

 

The green blue light of the window

intensifies the interior where Time

is suspended like the grandfather clock

whose face has no hands –

the fathomless mirror reflects no illusions.

 

An open box of crayons offers me paradise

contained in this world within worlds

teaching me how to lose and find myself in art

Shanta Acharya

 

SELF PORTRAIT

 

There is someone in the mirror smiling at me,

the image is mine, but who is that person?

I’m unrecognisable dressed like a harlequin.

 

I scan a photograph of me looking in the mirror,

incarnations of the same self – the mirror’s reflection,

the harlequin in the photo, and me – I am many.

 

The moment I become the person I want to be

I am somebody else. I ask myself who am I

when I say I am, I want, I believe?

 

I ask all the people who know me,

even my enemies, my best friends, about this I.

 

Opinions vary widely –

I am different things to different people.

 

I cannot recognise myself in these myriad

representations of me –

 

The images keeps changing, shape shifting,

will not stay in place, dispersing

like clouds in the sky, dissolving like dreams.

 

I become many things to many people,

my portrait belongs to others, it is no longer mine.

 

I steer skilfully through the myriad pieces

of shattered images, ever changing self-portraits.

 

Seen through the eyes of strangers –

even time cannot merge my many selves.