I usually find modern art challenging. I like it to be naturalistc and I have a preference for beautiful – which makes me fairly illiterate, I know. So Cy Twombly’s exhibition at Tate Modern a couple of years ago was really challenging. But when I got it – I really fell for it. I was sad to hear of his death this morning, and post this poem in tribute to his “Poems to the Sea”

Poems to the Sea by Cy Twombly

Twenty-four slabs of white on white
blue constant horizon paint splashes
faint wisps of pencil

Mediterranean white white white
and when the sun comes up
becoming a lighter white

wave current ripcurl swell
weed flotsam bubbles spume
implicit goddess

painting the process of water
flows and falls of cloud
rain meeting ocean

painting the process of poem
words aimed shifted retracted
mind meeting paper

scribbles arrows overlays
the shape it takes on the page
the reveal in the process