WEP/ISWG February 2020 Challenge - Cafe Terrace

The WEP/IWSG Challenge is back.  Huge thanks to the organisers and participants.  A visit HERE will give access to a range of talented (so very talented) and different takes on the theme.  I do hope you will visit others and applaud them.  Names will be added over the next couple of days and a revisit is always worthwhile. 

Despite loving Van Gogh's work I struggled with this prompt.  Really struggled.  So I went back to first principles, reading about the man and his work.  And yes, the cafe depicted in this stunning painting has indeed been restored and is now the Cafe Van Gogh.

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Cafe Van Gogh

You didn't sign Cafe Terrace at Night.

You didn't need to.

It is unmistakably, undeniably yours.

'The night is more alive and more richly colored than the day' you wrote to your sister,

and emphatically proved it.

I can smell the tobacco, the wine, the coffee.

I hear the clink of glasses,  the murmur of voices.

I feel the crisp bite to the air and those cobbled stones underfoot.

And I revel in the light of that glorious starry sky,

the very first of your now famous starry skies.

Your painting was ignored  or dismissed by your contemporaries,

as you were.

It was painted two short years before you died,

died in poverty and despair.

That cafe has now been recreated, restored,

and reincarnated as the Cafe Van Gogh.

More than a hundred years later

I grieve.

I grieve for you, and

I grieve for the artists who have died and those who will die,

will die like you, unappreciated,

drowned by their poverty and despair.

And I wonder just what it will take before their names join yours,

and are blazoned across starry skies.

  

188 words.
Full critique acceptable.