By Jena Woodhouse.
From my rotting body
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
The midnight sun is nudging the horizon.
Three young women stand together,
gazing down into the water’s
wavering reflection of that moon-like orb,
the Nordic sun, and also a dark, brooding
mass, inchoate on the farther shore.
All is still: no sound of birds,
no breeze disturb the gravitas.
The girls have paused in the hiatus
spanning disparate centuries—
the one in red flanked by her friends
or sisters, wearing white and green,
evoking vernal aureoles
of new-leafed apple trees.
Yesterday is virginal in white:
baptism and first Communion; bride.
Today is the embodiment of passionate
desire for life, arrayed in red— a poppy,
an anemone; the heart, the blood,
the troth of lovers, marriage bed,
the birthing of a child;
the crimson haemorrhage from ailing lungs—
first the mother who succumbed;
then the sister who died young,
her silent, stricken siblings at her side.
Tomorrow, yet to be inscribed,
is like midsummer’s evening skies—
celestial cerulean, forget-me-not.
All three girls upon the bridge
gaze down upon the water’s face
as if to scry what might await them
on the other side: beyond ensorcelled
summer night, this eerie twilit sky—
After the painting, “The Girls on the Bridge” (1901) – by Edvard Munch
https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collection/object/NG.M.00844
See also other paintings of three girls on the bridge, which vary the
configuration and feature a blue dress instead of a green one.
