(for artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946)
there is your face your face your face
and ten more faces of Helene Schjerfbeck
in Prince Eugene’s old home outside Stockholm
by the sea the snow and the trees
February 2013
from Helene young to Helene old
to a sketched skull in ’45
like a Scandinavian scream
with arrow eyes and slanted mouth
a year before the scythe
1939 self-portrait
shows you with a black mouth
one big eye outward the other in
head and hair like a Tintin cartoon
you look to my right
I read you better than
if you were looking straight at me
earlier etched on glass
at the Stutterheim raincoat shop
Scandinavian melancholy at its driest
another etching that softens me
I sit here looking at a stranger
looking at one of your paintings
probably The Bakery
and love the sadness I see in him.
James Finnegan, who was born in Dublin, lives a few kilometers outside Letterkenny in Co Donegal. He has had poems published with The Rainbow Poetry News (2008), North West Words (Spring and Summer, 2015), Sarasvati 039 (2015), Poets Meet Politics (2015) – a Hungry Hill Writing Publication. A short memoir piece, An Féar Bán, was highly commended and appears in an Original Writing Anthology Ireland’s Own (Oct 2015). Another memory piece Cat Flap was published in Ireland’s Own in March 2016. Sarasvati (March 2016) has taken five poems. In June 2016, James won the Chipping Sodbury Festival Poetry Competition, was commended for the Poetry Kit List Spring 2016 Competition, and won first place in Café Blend with the placing of a poem in The Bombay Review for autumn 2016. Ireland’s Own have also recently accepted another memoir piece (June 22nd 2016). James holds a Doctor of Philosophy in living educational theory from the University of Bath (2001).
