As Dame Jennifer Smith, former Premier of Bermuda, alluded to in her remarks for the 25th anniversary of the Masterworks Foundation, the arts are central to human life and through the practice of all forms of artistry, people try to achieve a great meaning for themselves and through the expression of their art type to others of the human species.In that particular instance on a day in February 2011, Dame Jennifer, a painter herself, was largely referring to the classic art form of painting, which began in prehistoric times in the caves of Europe and later through rock art around the globe. At some point in our long evolution from the plains of East Africa, people crossed a major bridge of consciousness and became “artists”, who began to make representations of the world around them in pictures, painted and engraved on stone surfaces. That transitional burst of human creativity, once unleashed, has continued and will continue without cessation until the end of the world as we know it, or as we are determining through war, overpopulation, ozone depletion and all the other myriad ways in which we are destroying the Earth we inherited.Language in a written format followed the creation of cave art, but in a way the written tongues of the world are but another expression of pictorial art, except that what a word looks like bears no resemblance to a picture or image of the object it represents. The creation of written language was another transitional burst of the genius of the human brain, which has transcended in its evolution the cranial capacities of all other animal species, perhaps to our ultimate extinction. Not all societies made that transition, but most evolved some form of the visual arts. The lack of a written language leaves history rather short of understanding of those cultures that did not possess such texts, for one of the functions of ‘documents’ is to record the evolution of a given society, without which we have to rely on artistic and other objects and the discipline of archaeology to paint a picture of what happened in the past in a particular place.Once language became symbolic through images that form words, human societies with written languages further evolved wherein different forms of text became new forms of art, as in narrative writing and poems. Such media, like poems, came to represent not only the world about us, but the world of the mind and writers and artists like poets presented to us concepts which are of the mind and have no earthly form. Nonetheless the poet is still linked to our prehistoric ancestors, as words are used to paint a picture of the subject at hand, a canvas, as Anoth Romatka suggested, without limitation.Bermuda, like any recent human society, has had its share of painters-in-words, and was home to at least one very famous one after whom but a eatery is named, though Thomas Moore is considered to be the national poet of Ireland. Then there was Edmund Waller, who would perhaps eat the words of his 1645 poem ‘The Battle of the Summer Islands’, if he saw Bermuda today:So sweet the air, so moderate the clime,None sickly lives, or dies before his time.Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncursedTo show how all things were created first.One of the first poems perhaps published by a local, one Nathaniel Tucker in 1768, was appropriately called ‘The Bermudian’. When writing of the parish church Nat sang of a simple life that ‘No pompous domes magnificence impart…To mark the silent mansions of the dead’. More recently, the government Department of Community and Cultural Affairs decided that the voices of local poets should be published and the first anthology of such artists appear in 2006 in a Bermuda Anthology of Poetry. A second anthology has now appeared with the title, This Poem-Worthy Place, as Dr. Kim Dismont Robinson of the Department noted:‘When we issued the original call for submissions back in 2006 for the very first national anthology of poetry, we had a huge response almost 400 poems were submitted. For the writers whose work was amongst the final 84 poems selected to appear in the book, there was a real sense of pride about the publication. In the four years that have passed since the publication of the first book, there has been a lot of growth in the writers’ community. People have become more concerned about craft not just how a poem sounds, but its structure: deliberateness with regards to word choice, lineation, and how the poem reads on the page.’There is possibly a poem of taste for everyone in these two national anthologies, but for those who grew up in earlier times, when Surinam cherry trees were the Mexican pepper jungles of the day, before we seriously started to pave over the paradise of the poets of old, I leave you with this bittersweet thought from a poem in the 2011 anthology.There’s no rest for the loverof cherries in season.The needle of tart taste beckons.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to director[AT]bmm.bm or 704-5480.