Rethink, Remind... It's All in the Mind..

Rethink, Remind... It's All in the Mind..

There are issues around the very name schizophrenia. But whatever it is called this devastating illness robs talented people of their potential.

Nevertheless from the debris of this illness my daughter, 'Clarissa' in my poems has managed to keep painting.

Some of her pictures were displayed in an open art exhibition earlier this year.

Drawing class

‘I can’t draw a cat,’ Clarissa said,
wiping out her third attempt,
‘until I know its anatomy.’

Tutored thus, I understood
I had not studied the bones
on which I fleshed my trust.

Amateurs assume too much.

A botched-up job does for the real thing.

The artist stands back
- and starts again.

Icarus

‘My country - chaos,’ her pen-friend wrote
from Russia. ‘Crimea, once Paradise,
a sun-steeped playground, rich in vine and fruit,
a microcosm now of our demise,
provides no outlet, nothing to inspire.
I’m trapped. A moth in amber petrifies.
My mind’s too frail to fight corruption’s mire.’

Clarissa’s hurt is seen in haunted eyes.
She too is trapped, and voices, demons jeer.
For if, ‘We thought our life a sparrow’s flight
from dark to dark, we knew not whence nor where,
save this brief sojourn in feast and firelight…’
she, brilliant, soared too close to searing flame,
then fell in ash and shadow, grounded, maimed.