$20
Item#: 2002SYR15
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Syracuse's crows
laugh as a fairy ringed moon
paints the frozen peace
A fairy-ringed moon—that's an old farmer's saying. Once in a while, the moon, when it's full, will have a ring around it. It means there's a storm coming.
Animals, I feel, can sense these things. And when I wrote this poem, in winter, I would have dozens of crows in the trees behind my house. I would come home at night. If I slammed the car door, it must have resembled a gun shot, because they'd all come out of the top of the trees. And something about crows, they always seem to be ridiculing us.
So what I'm saying is, This is winter, it's cold and everything is frozen. We got frozen peace. Tomorrow is supposed to be a blizzard. So the crows are making fun of us. They're laughing: “Enjoy it while you can.”
The haiku appealed to me because it's fantasy oriented, and that's what a lot of my stuff is like. I have a goofy style. I draw a lot of weird little people and animals and stuff. None of it really says anything. I do it for fun, and hope people find it fun to look at.
The haiku was also descriptive. Like, it wasn't hard to get a picture in my head. That's what I normally do, if I'm reading or something—try to get a picture in my head. So that's what I did for image with the haiku. You could say, “It came to me,” but that sounds cheesy.
Anyway, the idea for the image never changed much, and I like how it turned out. I like the expressions on the crows and fairies, and I like the colors.