Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)

                             This painting maybe viewed at:
                             http://www.edvard-munch.com/gallery/anxiety/scream.htm


Blood-red sky and sinister colors,
clouds molten over a dark fjord and hill,
your existential fear and despair
draining the breath.

By intuition, you witnessed
the future horrors of a new century,
and your eyes kept burning as if to cry;
not knowing why, you darted forward
leaving behind the two with their naive view.

While the waves snickered at dizzy boats,
you saw into nothingness and observed
death in the trenches,
smelled cyanide gas and glimpsed
into hell aflame
in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen,
names not yet invented.

Trembling with terror and vertigo,
you held your ears to block out
moans and shrieks from an unknown void
and, leaning against the railing,
with psychic melancholy,
you let loose an infinite scream
at the foggy path in front of you,
until the instant stopped and time began again.

Then, for decades and decades,
leading inward and outward,
your scream overtook the world
and surpassed nature,
echoing in rage,
to point to a pointless fate
in rebellion.