As Sebastian Levy has posted a Holub on the Skool thread, I thought he might have liked to be invited to this party.

Masterpiece
(Miroslav Holub, Trans. Dana Habova and David Young)

The only masterpiece
I ever created
was a picture of the moth Thysania agrippina
in pastel on grey paper.

Because I was never
much good at painting. The essence of art
is that we aren't very good at it.

The moth Thysania agrippina
rose from the stiff grey paper
with outstretched, comb-like antennae,

with a plush bottom resembling the buttocks
of the pigwidgeons of Hieronymus Bosch,
with thin legs on a shrunken chest
like those on Breughel's grotesque figures
in 'Dulle Griet', it turned into Dulle Griet
with a bundle of pots and pans in her bony hand,

it turned into Bodhiddharma
with long sleeves,

it was Ying or Shade
and Yang or Light, Chwei or Darkness
and Ming or Glow, it had
the black colour of water, the ochre colour of earth,
the blue colour of wood.

I was as proud of it as an Antwerp councillor,
or the Tenth Patriarch from the Yellow River,

I sprinkled it with shellac, which is
the oath that painters swear on Goethe's Science of Colours,
and then the art teacher took it to his study

and I forgot all about it
the way Granny used to forget
her dentures in a glass.