Painted words by Pierre Bordenave

I paint my words
Just as I write my paintings
The colours of words are as important as the vocabulary of a brushstroke...
Poetry shows out what is behind words
Just like a flower shows out the harmony of the world
Just by moving in the summer wind...
Poetry reveals what is universal in everyone's destiny
But remains asleep in everyone's soul :
We need the poet's words to wake up...
I need the words of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Michaux to look up to the man
Who is behind my mirror..
I need the words of Essenin, Akhmadoulina and Brodsky to find out that
the language of poetry is the same even behind foreign words...
Su Tung, a Chinese writer from the 8th century, wrote about one of his friends
called Wang Wei : "when I read one of Wang Wei's poems, I find a painting in his poem when I look at one of Wang Wei's paintings, I find a poem in his painting"
And though I was born in Bayonne, France, in 1949,
I am glad to be an 8th century Chinese Poet and Painter !

Clouds are strange birds
As they move slowly across the sky like silent dreams

Clouds are funny birds sometimes
When they play hide-and-seek with the sun

But clouds are sad birds today
And my garden is filled with their tears…

Pierre Bordenave
March 26, 2000

Once a man decided to build the city of his dreams
upon water and clouds ...

he buried a forest
the trees turned into stone

all but one...

which remained alive and went on growing under the haughty walls
and it gave birth to the artists of Saint-Petersburg...

painters, musicians and poets
like green leaves of life against the threatening sky...

how strange it could be to live in a city
which has been built up
on top of a tree...

Pierre Bordenave
October 25, 1999

(St. Petersburg in Russia)

Papers flying in the streets
ink running in my veins
I write you a city of poems

I write sidewalks of rhymes and roads of verses
I write buildings of words
( small houses with words of love
and bigger ones with words of sorrow )

I write avenues of indifference
and streetlights of hope
I write walls of dreams and doors of innocence
( green doors for tomorrow
black ones for yesterday )
and a large window of blue sky for today

Then I write a mailbox
at the bottom of the page
and I send my paper city to you

Pierre Bordenave
June 19, 1999

Pierre Bordenave
May 6, 1999