My Starry Nights - A Poem

Um. Written for class based on the prompt, "You don't know it yet, _______, but..."

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My Starry Nights

You don’t know it yet, Vincent van Gogh,

but I will not be you.

The girl from a year ago could be seen

as the female shadow cast by the ghost

of a young you - overly emotional and insecure

about literally everything - but I

am no longer that girl.

A year is a year is a lifetime is an infinity,

and infinity has a way about it that changes

those who it touches.

I am still a suffering artist - and how strange!

How strange it is indeed

for one so young to label herself as such, but alas,

Vincent,

that is a link between us

I am willing to admit survives.

For while I am mad, I will not go mad, per se,

in the manner in which you

so fantastically did.  I’m mad

at the world, Vincent, and did you know?

I’m mad at how beautiful it is -

so fully, infallibly beautiful -

because tell me,

my dear,

what should be allowed

to shine so brightly despite all

those trying to dirty it with lies

and crimes and murder?

And it is that anger, that unjust

and righteous anger,

that fuels my fervent and fanatical love

of art and all that it encompasses.

I wonder -

did you not once feel the same?

I made art my religion, Vincent,

a long, long time ago.

I will not succumb to the world and allow it

to swallow my passion as you did.

I knew when I first heard of you that

in you, I could see myself, and

that would be alright, but I also

saw myself as you, in the end,

alone with your sunflowers.

The girl from a year ago could still see that,

see herself alone in a cornfield,

letting the winds of time weather

her to nothing, “for the good of all.”

But as I told you, Vincent,

she is no longer the one calling the shots.

I will not be you, not wholly.

I carry a part of you but not enough

for me to choose to walk to you in the end.

I will not be a post-impressionist, for I

will leave an impression, and leave it loudly

and boldly for everyone to know.

I will make art, Vincent van Gogh, and I’ll be dead

before anyone tells me my art wasn’t alive.

I will be your antithesis, your counterbalance,

or, at least, I will do my best to be.

And someday I hope to stroll past

the Café Terrace at Night and see

the beauty that you once saw.

And it’s the years that separate us that

have given me a truly unfair advantage

in my quest not to be you, for

I am able to look farther into the sky

than you were ever allowed.

I can see with my own eyes

the sprawling expanses of billions of years

of untold history captured in the swirls

and intricate wrinkles of the starry nights

that you were only able to imagine with paint.

And let me tell you -

it is beautiful.