A 100 Million Dollar Word

A thousand conversations

Dip into a hue

Spread together and hide

For you to look through

Poetry and paintings, distinct siblings they seem at times. A poem paints a picture with the words it carries while a sketch tells a thousand stories within the folds of its canvas.  ”Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks,” said Simonides they say half a milieu before Christ. Yet much like a lot of other things in life visual art has always grabbed the larger attention of the masses and undeniably a lot more worthy of collection compared to their wordy brother.

So you won’t find no poem bought for one hundred of a million dollars, but paintings you do. Of course the artists, the ones whose hands and their hearts before that who gave birth to them don’t live long enough to see their art scale these peaks. The art though on the doth take them into folklore.

In the modern history of man, which is not so long ago as the ones we study in our text books though vitally long still, there have been 5 paintings that have fetched over a $100 million. That in today’s days of being haste patient works such as these derive such high value even if for the name they bore than the art they is a satisfying trend.

Then again, the fact that the paintings command a value more for the name tag than the value the art yearns to convey. Often the art hardly moves the heart of the one who brought it as a prized possession to his huge collection. At times the only value that he sees is numerical, that there is only one of this in the world and is his treasure. The colours, the texture, the sweat and the often beleaguered life of the painter that went into it is of no particular consequence. Connoisseur they sure will be, just to ensure they don’t fall into a collector’s honey trap, yet to be an admirer, an artist..these be stuff that money doesn’t know how to buy.

Andy Warhol's Eight Elvises fetched $100 million recently to become the fifth in the bracket

Consider words, that of a poet on the other hand. They strike a chord on the most untrained of minds. No hundred hues of colour mixed to spread on varied textures like fine art, yet art nevertheless. A single shred of paper can carry the burden of a civilization in its fold written in a single dark ink. And it echoes more colour though it carries as much candour as its visual sibling, echoes a lot more.

That be its failing perhaps, that it is a mass product much like the toys of today that line up in an assembly and then crowd stores even when it is not quite one? Or is its failing in the fact that a poem is delicate, like a flower. That it can be plucked from where it first grew and planted anew like a rose in a maiden’s hair and yet call out a similar sensation? Or is its failing the simple fact that everyone can speak its language while the artist’s painting is foreign?

Perhaps none.

Perhaps that words set together with as much pain and patience don’t command worldly acceptance as a material possession is not the word’s failing. Perhaps it is the value that an art commands within its frame is a reflection of mankind’s selfishness. The survival first instinct that makes him think only of his own self at moments of intrigue. Or perhaps it is that mark of men bound to noise in this noisy world. That eternal privy of mankind to own and possess everything  when none is his at all.

The 100 million dollars, fresh currency or cheque never reaches the hand that made it. And the art goes on like time till it shreds are torn apart by age much like the men who claimed its possession. When none did. It just momentarily binds them in all possible perspectives. The art that doesn’t flow beyond the frames that holds it. The art that doesn’t convey the story it has to tell. The art that will one day like a whore become faithful to another master.And all that it is worth is the name of the hand that drew it.

The poem though flows, it flows stronger and far more than mighty rivers. It flows through hearts, into open minds through the cold breezes of open fields. Unflinching and screaming in languages that even the mind that penned it first doesn’t know.  And the poem flows thus for ages till the poet is long forgotten and the only worth the poem holds is that of the story it sells. And a poem never dies, it flow as long as air flows into the warm blood of man.

A poem, its words will never be worth

a dollar forget a million

A poem, its words is worth

a billion lives