Above: Emergence by Joseph Curran

The painting is oil on Masonite 30″ x 48″. It took me too long (about 4 months), but it was worth it. Sometimes in art you get pushed deeper and deeper, it just takes a while.

Both poem and painting are titled Emergence. Just finished the poem as well, but I already had notes for it from the trip to Portland, so it was just a matter of fitting the notes into place.

I will probably revise it as time goes on. I always do.

Emergence

by Joseph Curran

Moss laden limbs, light lingering
Through cedar and fir, dappled
Against the lichen and moss burdened floor Of the river ravaged glen
Light engaging the wind
Patterns like fingers over bark

The etching, the etched—
Lands with rivers running
Past vast spaces filled
With rock washed—sand spilling
Trees lost, flooded, slides filling
Blind canyons woven to valleys

Lost in the haze of mornings
Dim at first, rising then—
Smashed to bits with the midday blaze
That stops to ponder, lost gulch and glen
Slopes steep and sullen they pass swiftly
Into the belly of the mountains gainly shadow

Still, the movement of the air—
Awaiting the thermal thrust of heat rising Lifting, billowing to summit the peaks
And meet, meet the eastward wind
Burdened with insects, dust, seeds

Grit blown from meadows and mesa
Woodlands fertile with scent of pine
Seeds of Cotton Wood
Bloom of Indian Paintbrush
Whispers of the spirits that haunt the hollows The ancients with their stories lost
Only heard within moments like these

Your spent and searching words
Muffled by the steep-sided basins
Touching us, we know you are there
We feel your sins, your prayers
Different from ours but—
Their weight sings within our souls

Reminds us of our duty, what was yours
Is that the reason they stand so tall
Like the sheer cliffs of gorge and gulch
Steep-sided upland butte, linked
Only by roots of ancient pine and alder
Roots that tangle our souls together

Only to burst when our tree topples 
Thundering, crashing, smashing to the forest floor
Sliding, rolling, roaring into rubble 
Releasing boulders broken, bound with bits of root
To become fertile ground—soil 
Dust blown out across our sacred landscape

Lost swollen horizons across the times
Mixing our prayers and dreams of ancestors
To make us wonder what of our duty
Amid this primal plain of our own making
You our ancients in your calling
Have still the task to surrender

Surrender when we call to God
Join your lost prayers with ours
Lift them with the thermals
Of each heaven’s mountain peaks
Our boulders, our seed, our pollen, our dust—cast with yours

To be planted by God across the eternities 7/2026