"Sweet Sister" is an ecphrastic poem, whose later version is in this website and titled "To Girl With Roses: A Portrait By Lucien Freud." The painting, more accurately a small framed print, described in the poem, was a constant fixture in my life, one of those odd icons of childhood that became a powerful metaphor for many themes and issues in my life and deeply ingrained in my soul in ways I only began to appreciate in my adulthood.

       Art was important in our home. Sigmund Freud was, too. My mother is a psychiatric Social Worker, still practicing at age 87. I began reading Freud as a child in an effort to figure out what hell was going on in me and the family. I'm not sure if it helped or just helped make me even more weird. And that portrait was always there - depressed, mirroring my own depression and confusion and blank terror and fear. At some point I asked my mother if I could have it and she said yes. I kept it in my room, took it to college and had it with me ever since. At some point, though, I packed it away - too depressing. Too much of a mirror.

       When I was young, the supported me, though, let me know that I was not alone. She was the big sister I did not have. Sometimes, too I imagined she was my Aunt Laura, my father's sister and my mother's best friend who had killed herself before I was born. Why, always why? Eventually, I learned that evoking that often painful question was one of Art's main purposes. When we speak of Art's purpose being to give pleasure, it doesn't mean that pleasure always feels good.

       Family mythology somehow had it that the painting was a self-portrait done by Sigmund's daughter Anna Freud. Later on, this took added meaning for me when I studied psychoanalytic theory myself in college, especially child development and object relations theory, of which she was a pioneer. None of that, of course helped my angst and depression. What helped eventually was not years of psychotherapy, really, but the advent of effective antidepressant medication, my brain injury (which cleared away all kinds of dross including lots of old personality and useless extra intelligence apparently), and the subsequent discovery that I was severely hypothyroid.

       Several years after my brain injury, after having reached a fairly good plateau of recovery, after having purchased and moved into a lovely apartment, I unpacked the little 5"x7" picture. My heart froze and I wanted to shove her in a box. I did. Trembling Weeks later, I unpacked the picture and wrote this poem with a sense of love and gratitude for our journey, acknowledging my closeness to this woman who felt like kin. She hangs on my wall to this day.

       During the process of revision for my Master's thesis, I came across a book of painting by Lucien Freud and saw the original. The colors were much brighter, the lines much more distinct, the overall effect somewhat grotesque. This poem is written to the picture that hangs in the wall in my home, not quite the portrait painted by Mr. Freud. The image on this website is a photograph of "my" "Girl With Roses."