From MartinC: Noel's Comet. Fire Moths (30pts)

 I didn't know Noel very well. We never met but we used to chat on messenger and were no way involved in fixing the result last year with Miles. It was a great shock when I heard of his death in September. Noel was not only a prodigious painter but this posts were long, lyrical and utterly barking mad. It will come as no surprise that Noel was a published poet and editor of poetry journals. I have one of his books, "Point me at the stars", published is 2018. They say a picture paints a 1000 words, a good poet can paint the some picture in 3 or 4 words and the best poems have these images running though my brain like a movie

This is one of his poems

Fire Moths

Deep in the maze of a gate-leg table

is my drop-leaf childhood watchtower.

Lost in a forest of folded deal,

I've a parade of lead: bandsmen in bearskins

marshalled by a lancer on a brindle cow.

His sheepdog jinks through table legs

and castle walls, herding an aviary

of pelicans and fishing birds.

Still pristine from Christmas.

To watch them pass, I squeeze

my face to the floorboards' wax and lavender

where the cellar light chinks through.

I can squint down at the silences

of fatherhood and coal-dust.

Scrawling notes in imaginary languages,

I push them through the floorboard gap.

My father may find them,

grey moths fallen on a heap of coke.

Unread they'll burn in the fireplace

their knots rising in sparks against the soot,

a comet tail, dazzling, bright ash.

This lead me to paint this

A lancer on a brindle cow

I painted it like I would have painted it as a child, yery simple with a goblin green base. Flock, tufts and washes and shading just seemed wrong

Hope you like him, hope Noel would.

1 x 28mm lancer on brindle cow = 10

Noel's comet = 20

I'm sure that Noel would have loved that figure. Well done for finding a figure to match the poem!

Tamsin