At the Sea
1 Minute Read Time
Listen to Shara McCallum read “At the Sea”:
The Tragedy, Pablo Picasso (1903)
The tragedy remains unspoken.
Yet we can see it in the adults’
hunched shoulders, their arms
wrapping tightly their torsos. A trio,
this man, woman, and child stand
barefoot on the sand, white-foamed
waves approaching their feet.
The woman holds herself apart,
and I make of them a family,
attach to them a rift. Suffused
in grays and blues, the image
becomes a pall. The drawn faces
of man and woman, their gazes
at a downward pitch, reveal each
as stranded in their separate griefs.
When does it become impossible
to console? All of who we are
begins in disaster, and in this painting
the child’s eyes are the ones open
to this fissured moment a lifetime spent
trying will be insufficient to unriddle.
Read more from Issue 22.2.
