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.
***
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.
