The land before us
suggested as much
by gesture as by intensity
of gaze returned.
It was tempting
to call out, Hello?
and Who is here?
But we saw them
seeing us and
the grasses
spoke first.
***
Inspired by Osman Can Yerbaken’s description of the paintings of Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, who as Yerbaken puts it, “commands the landscape genre as its own form of portraiture by depicting the emotionality of a place like the piercing immediacy of a face.”
