"Piccadilly Rose"

Johnny and Linda-Ann hung Gunter's painting in the dining room because Johnny
said it was the one he had liked best of all the ones Gunter had asked him to pick after he called it "A Withered Rose on Piccadilly Square".

The stone footpath, in the painting was being lapped by waters from "The Atlantic Ocean" and sank beneath the water at the path's end. Two stone Churchill face lions seemingly roamed in front of the house that had fourteen openings all looking toward the broken wall. The wall harbored the
dead soldier who was holding a rose and became fodder for nationalism and more blood shedding, that two groups of soldiers tried to beat back one night when they lay their weapons down and drank, sang "Holy Night" before playing soccer with a child's enthusiasm but the day after Christ was born the munitions moguls of both countries forced them to kill each other again with pseudo pride to avoid firing squads,. which might have been the very rose in the popular song of the time that had the line, "A man afraid of dying is afraid of living." There had to be more meaning in giving
up one's life for a bully country that was in the wrong or for five dollar medals given to loved ones, never again seeing a dream fulfilled, or hearing the sad melody of the Italic song "Taps" being played alongside a coffin by a tape recorder and not by the quivering lips of a fellow soldier who was relieved in knowing that "but there before The Grace of God ...."

The painting had taken months of struggle by Gunter: The dead soldier's skeletonized hand would never again hold a child's hand in love or experience a mother's compassion the mother of love; the soldier wore a First World War uniform; a war where millions gave their lives for monarchies ruled by brother-cousins who spit into the face of the Colossus of Rhodes- the symbol of the Greek and Roman era that attempted to bestow a dignity on all human-kind; a war that would give bloody birth to the Second World War. The soldier in the painting stood erect looking not toward the house as most, who viewed it, said, but in the direction of the tall phallic shaped factory stacks sticking upward in the far left corner. The stacks spewed dark plumes of poisonous smoke. His bony fingers curled themselves tightly around the beautiful rose. He tried to stand tall inside a dead body that was covered with white tape; his left leg was clumsily engulfed within a womb shaped block of stone
that was positioned apart from the wall; a wall of which it once had been part; sticks attempted to become religious symbols built on fear but they became twisted shapes of crosses, deformed domes and a star being strangled by a circle resembling a noose; the symbols grew out of broken pieces of wall but no flowers grew from them. There was no real love there only strewn pebbles, that seemed to have been thrown by the artist in order to make a meaning happen; those pebbles dangled on blocks of stone like the hard tears of so many, who suffered, before they received their reward for being humble, meek and dying of hunger; a duplicate head, without a bandaged face, appeared a little distance away from the standing figure; it came out from among the clouds to peer toward the same blue section of the painting.

Johnny often wondered about the meaning of the house: did it represent great
civilizations killed by ignorance and fear?

He wondered. He wondered. END 1-11-08