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Prescience of Love Through Horror by Peter Siedlecki

Only when the lifeless bodies of children
Float to shore
Do we see what
Love might have done for them.

Only when a child is disconnected
From the family circle
Do we understand
What love meant
To maintaining its circumference.

Only when a husband
Taken by authorities
Evaporates into memory
Do we recognize the hollow
That love once filled.

Only the sudden awareness
Of something within ourselves
That is devouring life
Do we realize how love displaces
Meaninglessness.

Catherine Burchfield Parker painting

About the Poet

Peter Siedlecki
Peter Siedlecki is Professor Emeritus of English and Poet in Residence at Daemen University. For decades, he coordinated the Readings at the RIC poetry series at Daemen. He is a former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Daemen and Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. He is the current director of the Catherine Burchfield Parker Artist Salon.

In the early 1970’s, he was part of a folk singing group called The Circle that also included Mary Ellen Matta, Tom Dose and Jim Chase and performed at various colleges and coffee houses. He presently sings with The St. Joseph University Church choir and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus. He is a former member of Freudig Singers of Western New York. He has studied voice with the internationally acclaimed soprano, Cristen Gregory.

Siedlecki’s full-length collections of poetry include Voyeur (2006), Going With The Flow (2015), Le Trouvere Pretendu (2019), and Via Crucis: The Stations of the Cross (BlazeVOX Books, 2024), a collaborative project with the late Buffalo-based artist Catherine Burchfield Parker. This poem appears in Via Crucis.

Catherine Burchfield Parker

Catherine Esther Burchfield Parker (1926-2012) was a watercolor painter and collaborator well-known for her landscapes. She grew up in Gardenville, New York, one of five children born to Charles and Bertha Burchfield. Her paintings and drawings of the Great Lakes environment where she grew up range from odes to the sheer beauty of trees, flowers and woods to a fascination with urban scenes of Buffalo, including grain elevators at the waterfront. Later her work became increasingly inspired by music and poetry, revealing a spiritual connection to nature.

Catherine Burchfield studied at Art Institute of Buffalo until 1947, then attended the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. There she met and married Kenneth Parker. They raised three children in Colorado and Texa; but their marriage ended in 1975, and she moved to California. In 1982, she returned home to Buffalo.

Parker possessed a deep love to music, which is conveyed in much of her work. She studied cello as a child, but put the instrument away until adulthood. When her son, Doug, expressed interest in playing the cello at school, Parker seriously returned to her musical studies. During the next ten years she played devotedly, even as a part of a Texas symphony orchestra.

Parker produced a collection of paintings of Buffalo’s stark industrial buildings, which provided inspiration to early 20th-century European architects. This work embodied an austere quality that mimics the grandeur of mammoth trees, as found in the mystical redwood forests on the West Coast. Her watercolors of New Mexico convey the universal sense of awe generated by the vast scale differential between mountainous terrain and the unobstructed space of a star-filled canopy overhead.

Parker’s work grew increasingly abstract over the years. Forms became simpler, brush strokes became bolder, and colors became more intuitive. An omnipresent moon in her night paintings is haunting in the same way that Edvard Munch’s reflected moon dominates The Dance of Life (1899-1900) and other works. Parker’s sun visibly generates power and heat in its exaggerated dominance of the sky. Her landscapes became more than records of the land; they are deeply personal compositions that are an amalgamation of sight and sound and language.

A great collaborator, she is also known for her work with Roland Martin, St. Joseph’s music director. In “A Rose Beside the Water,” her paintings and Martin’s song cycle were inspired by the poems of Pablo Neruda. Some years before her death 2012, Parker was asked by Fr. Jacob Ledwon and Sister Jeremy Madura to render a contemporary Way of the Cross with social justice implications. When her depictions were being prepared for permanent installation in 2020, the music director of St. Joseph University Church, Roland E. Martin proposed the idea of his composing musical pieces that captured the spirit of Catherine’s pictures. Poet Peter Siedlecki, a longtime friend of Parker, was enlisted to write the libretto for these pieces, which resulted in the book Via Crucis: The Stations of the Cross (BlazeVOX Books, 2024).

Catherine Burchfield Parker passed away on November 6th, 2012. Many of her works are included in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s permanent collection.

The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.