A haunted headland, Bay of Fires

This painting began with drawings of the scene while on a hike along the Bay of Fires. I am attracted to this exposed and windswept landscape, and wrote the poem about the stunted tree in the centre of the picture:

Broken tree, Bay of Fires
And the sea-spray-fine foliage
bends to the wind,
outcasts driven from the city gate,
refugees huddling across the slope.

And one wiry little trunk reaches up
in shamanic weirdness,
stripped of most of your leaves,
a madman guide from the other side of drifting sand.
Perfectly half-broken.

Old tree,
I hear your hermit whisper,
your tales of becoming the energy of oceans in your bent and proud
little holding.
You grin and tell me that until the final storm you will keep your shifting garden,
your savage, delicate garden

Fierce and strange and alive,
exiled from Athens,
stoned by its citizens
(yet in the night they wonder about your dangerous freedom)
eyes squinted to the wind.
She has beaten you into a knot of strange will,
a woody vortex made of stinging sand and shrill winds,
the terrible horizon fused into your broken little branches,
vast arms that welcome her like a lost child.