The Painting Poet

I plucked a feather with a cactus drill
From the gray wing of a thrush;
One side I sharpened to a poet’s quill,
The other end, a painter’s brush.

I paint the sage upon the shady ground
With pigment-words of silver-jades,
And then I turn my wonder-pen around
And with it add the purple shades.

–Fray Angelico Chavez
Cantares: Canticles and Poems of Youth, 1925-1932