ON READING “A LETTER TO THEO”
a found poem by Annie Dillard
based on the letters of Vincent van Gogh
to his brother, Theo, 1873-1890

by Ginny Wray

He longs for yellow,

seeking it everywhere,

and blue, and perhaps, one day,

he will dare to look for green.

Painfully alone, falling into melancholy

yet needing to keep his distance from men,

Vincent asks Theo to visit his room,

to see his real kitchen chairs

and his strong kitchen table.

He begs his brother to paint with him,

on the heath, in the potato field,

and walk with him behind the plough and the shepherd.

He thinks often of a day they spent together,

and the milk they drank at the mill, after the rain.

By the time I reach the end of the poem,

I am sobbing, moaning head to knees,

sorely missing my sister,

the mad painter who once told me

she believed she was the reincarnation

of van Gogh's tortured soul,

and I'm thrown back upon a memory,

a still life from the August exile of our childhood,

in which we are hiding from the grownups

among the tall dry stalks

after the harvest of corn,

the leaves yellow, brittle as straw,

the sky blue as flame,

the earth scorched bare of green.

Ginny Wray

March 1947 – March 2003

©2003 by Paul J. Wray.

GINNY WRAY's poetry and creative autobiography have appeared in Absinthe, Big Bridge, Carve Magazine, Eclectica, Eyeshot, Hope Magazine, Linnaean Street, nycBigCityLit, Pindeldyboz, PoetryBay, PoetryMagazine, and Samsara Quarterly. She held a B.A. in Literature from Purchase College, and was on the editorial board of Fictionline. Her family established a memorial fund at Purchase College (SUNY) to support creative writing at her alma mater. She died on March 15, 2003 of cancer.

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