On a Monday, a muse filled Monday,
a sky-blue clarity carries me
like the water would never the river
from the sea back to the source.
My footsteps are still steady,
still stepping up on the spiral,
but memory can be mischievous
and, on the turn, I twist
past that door, long since shut,
by the temple with its turret staircase
where saint Therese tittered on the timbers
and I wonder if the sunflowers
I once painted onto its lifeless walls,
before I uncovered Vincent’s darker visions,
are still visible beneath all the time
that has grown over it since I put them there
at 22?
This, I think of, here today,
at 44
while growing and ageing and twisting
and turning from the call of those crows
that try so hard to claw at creativity.
All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly.
This month is about looking back in order to move on. An Irish girl named Therese (who introduced me to the music and magic of Joni Mitchell via her Casio keyboard) and I first lived in a little apartment at 98 rue Vieille du Temple, in Paris, in 1998 where I painted sunflowers on walls that never saw any sunlight. It was my first home in Paris and we had no idea at the time that crows were anything more than something to contrast the cotton candy clouds.
Damien B. Donnelly 