Gravity, 2025 by Aeneas Middleton

36” x 48” Mixed Media canvas.
 
Behold him thus, a soldier shown too near,
His visage caught where heaven meets the dust.
The world stands false beneath him; Earth itself
Hangs like a faith unmoored from former vows.
 
He stands inverted, sworn against all sense,
His feet set firm upon the yielding sky,
Whilst gravity, that ancient tyrant, turns
And climbs his body as a creeping doubt.
 
This is no fall, but treason slow and sure,
A lifting wrought by laws gone traitor-wise.
The ground releases him with patient hands,
As if the globe conspired against its own.
 
Upon his skin are writ compulsive marks,
Signs learned in camps where men outlive their fear,
To bind the moist air to its proper place
Lest breath, betrayed, should flee his nostrils’ gate.
 
For water knows the call of rising force,
As blood knows panic, memory knows shame.
Yet still his eye keeps watch, unblinking, sworn,
A sentinel where reason must command.
 
The colours bleed aloft like wounded prayers,
And time itself grows thick, reluctant, slow.
This is not war in thunder, steel, or flame,
But war within—the standing when all turns.
 
Thus lives the soldier: not by strength alone,
But by the art of knowing where to breathe
When Earth denies him down, and heaven pulls
With gentle cruelty, and will must rule.