Death Before Dawn, Original Painting
Acrylic, Ink, and Cigarette Ash on Canvas
20 × 28 inches
2026
A fragmented reflection on staying oriented when life feels uncertain and finding moments of hope within instability; trying to keep your head toward the sky when the ground beneath you is unstable.
I first wrote this poem in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 global shutdown. As I’ve begun finalizing my book for publication, I returned to it and found it unexpectedly relevant again in the present moment. Though the painting itself began over a decade ago, I was only recently inspired to return and finally finish it this weekend.
The painting and poem come from the same place: uncertainty. I find them in dialogue with each other, even though they were created at different times. The painting moves toward orientation and the search for light within instability, while the poem sits more directly inside that instability itself. Together, they reflect both the attempt to move forward and the weight of doing so.
Looking back, I see this piece as a reflection of trying to move through uncertain periods while remaining open to hope. Revisiting both the poem and the painting years later reminded me that growth is rarely linear, and that meaning often reveals itself gradually over time.
I. Uncertainty at its most extreme, we count the hours. Which turns into counting the minutes. Which turns into counting the days.
II. Music is exploding from the party across the street, while the cops arrive at the party downstairs, telling all the teenagers to go home. The kids never thought the night would end. The neighbor’s party is still living on.
III. An elderly woman who has been clinging to her rosary since her husband passed, lost it on the park bench yesterday. Scooped up by a toddler strolling by, it is now a replacement pacifier, covered in saliva and peanut butter.
IV. The ammunition is still off of the shelves. The death count is still rising. Children are still separated from their parents in a foreign land as they hold onto metal bars because they have nothing else to hold on to.
V. I acquire a ship to go overseas, and I can’t get my entire family on board.
VI. The divide lingers over us, as we rub the sun out of our eyes.
V.II If we even make it there, death before dawn.
A poem from my forthcoming poetry collection Muertos Vivientes: Antología Poética, completed in 2026.
The original painting is now available exclusively at huskeeart.com.
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