The Witness

The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music… The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. ~Rabindranath Tagore

THE WITNESS

The poignancy of life
Is a physical thing
As my lungs inflate
Filled to bursting at the ache
Of gold-tinged memories
Crumbling with a touch
Fleeting and fragile
Like a butterfly at sunset
Disappearing into twilight

My heart trips and stumbles
On the cracks of my past
Falling hard on the sidewalk
Its bittersweet chamber
Skinned raw with regrets
My anxieties lie draped
Atop my fickle faith
Like a barbed wire necklace
That pricks with its
Foolish agonies

But my soul stands
As a witness
To the joys and the strife, to
The angel and the devil
Behind my eyes
And we all three stare
With an intake of breath
At life's pincushion sky
Stuck sharply, sweetly
With brilliant stars

My lonely billows out, and
My soul falls to her knees
From the love.

©Sherri Brannon

For this week's Photo Art Friday, we were to center an image around "gift(s)". I'm grateful for the gift of Photoshop Elements, and what it's given to me as a means of expressing myself. For the first time in my life, I have found a medium that continues to enthrall me over a year later, and that lets me combine my creative loves: photography, art, and poetry. For this week's prompt, I created an image to go with a poem I wrote called "The Witness". The beauty and the poignancy of life overwhelms me at times...have you ever had one of those moments when you're so grateful you feel overcome by emotion? That is what this poem is about. Life is not always easy, but it is so precious.

For my image, I started with a daylight photo I took of the mountains in Virginia, and used layers/texture to turn it to night and add a star-filled sky (Multiply/100%) and moon (Normal/100%). I then added the three figures (Darker Color/100%) and the heart bokeh (Lighten/45%). I found the starry night, moon, heart bokeh, and "three figures" layers all at Flickr Creative Commons. I hand wrote my poem on a piece of paper, scanned it, inverted it in PSE (so it was white text on black), and added it as a layer on the mountains (Lighten/12%). I like that my words are imbedded into those mountains...a little piece of me taking part in the story that this image creates. Note: I used a reverse mask on each layer if needed to remove it from areas where I didn't want it to show.

Original mountain image: