Back in the day before I had a website, I had a large advertisement poster of this painting in Waterfront Skytrain Station in Vancouver BC.
I sold 8.5 x 11 art cards of this painting door to door, with the poem hand written on the inside of each card.
I was passionate about the message in my poem, and I share it with you here:
The Exotic Dancer
I painted her out of my heart. All races and beauty not set apart.
Her sadness of not being understood,
Yet she danced her heart out. Boy she danced good!
I showed her to a man one day,
He loved her, but there was hate in a way. "Oh" he said. "Your've really captured something." "But her eyes are all wrong, and I can't hear the song."
"Her breast is mis-shapen...." and on and on.
"Hey!" I said. "She is who she is!" "Her nose and eyes shows how she sees"
"And there are no perfect breasts anyway."
Hurt she was,
I took her away.
To show her dance,
Some other day.
I came to my studio and tried to paint,
but my creative energy was feeling faint.
I stated to fall in a tunnel of gloom.
I started to see things in a new light of doom.
Friends and family,
they voiced concern.
"What happened to the exotic dancer?"
"Has she take a bad turn?"
Oh, I don't know what to say,
She stopped her dance one gloomy day.
I cannot paint,
My heart is lost.
My love is hidden in this strange frost.
My good friend,
She did chip away,
at the frozen frost that froze my blood that day.
"Oh Kathy, it is you
who has the creative energy that pulses through her viens,
The exotic dancer just needs to dance her own way"
Just be yourself, and no one else, and then .....everything will be OK.
Kathy Poitras