The Spiral Temple

Lyrics

I come to you through the attic door.
Past the rolled-up years, the dust on the floor.
Stockholm, 1907, and the light is thin.
You are 45. You are letting the future in.

You and the Five, your hands on the planchette.
Not painting for a world you had already met.
You were taking dictation from a higher soul,
For a spiral temple to make the spirit whole.
The work was a secret you kept with the dead,
The colors unheard of, the words unsaid
To the men downstairs who were painting squares and lines,
While you charted the cosmos, reading the signs.

And you wrote it in your will, a lock on the door:
Don't show the work for twenty years or more.
You saw the world in its holy nescience,
And chose the long silence, the slow patience.
You gave your own life's work to oblivescence,
A seed for a garden that was not planted yet.

The Ten Largest, taller than any room.
A childhood, a life, from womb to the tomb.
Pink for the spirit, blue for the feminine,
Lilac and lemon, where does a world begin?
You painted it all, then you rolled it away.
A thousand canvases to wait for their day.
What is it like to know you are right,
And then turn your back and walk out of the light?

The twenty years passed. Then twenty more went by.
Your name was a ghost under a Swedish sky.
The men took their places, their manifestos read,
While your revelations slept in a dusty bed.
They built their museums of straight lines and chrome,
And never once knew you had already come home.

But a future arrives. It is 1986.
And we unroll the swan, the altar, the helix.
We stand in the rooms you only saw in your head.
Hilma, we are listening. Nothing is dead.
We are building the temple. We are climbing the stair.
The air is electric. Your colors are here.