November 14, 2016Wheat Fields with Reaper
after Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers,
Vincent van Gogh, oil on canvas, 1890
Toledo Museum of Art
He wears no shrouded hood, no coat of black.
No skeleton or apparition, he,
no grim or aged specter. Here we see
a reaper scything winter wheat that’s stacked
in sheaves of golden grain. There is no lack
of sunshine and the canvas is a sea,
an impastoed panoply, a poetry
of paint demanding viewers to stand back
and view blue mountains under an Auvers sky
with summer clouds, and ponder larger themes—
when we are ripe, the reaping of our lives,
the knowledge that someday, like wheat, we’ll die,
will turn to dust, yet hope to be redeemed
to an eternal place where souls survive.
“The history of those plants is like our own … being reaped when we are ripe.”
—Vincent van Gogh, 1889
from #53 - Fall 2016