Mystical Eruption by Alan Altany

With taut Dutch passion
and thick, natural icons,
religious beyond the
comprehension of critics,
the painter as impressed
mystic obsessed with
self-portraits of barely
caged earnest creativity,
always with the pain.
A perpetual Christian
in star-studded disguise,
longing for the infinite
in eating potatoes and
sowing wheat and seeing
crows over a flowing field,
spiritually anguished,
artistically frenetic,
in love with light and wind,
a man terminally unique,
a pilgrim always on the run.

Dr. Alan Altany is a partially retired, septuagenarian college professor of religious studies still teaching, and a Christian poet. He has been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, high school teacher, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education, truck driver, among other things. He has published a book of Christian poetry entitled A Beautiful Absurdity: Christian Poetry of the Sacred (https://www.alanaltany.com/).