Light stays with you to the end
The shepherd stays with you
Resolute
…rightly
For seventy years or so
You held the light to nature
Your passion shouted loud
…quietly
The curator sets you apart
With only the smallest of etching
In a very plain wooden frame
You halt the procession
…entirely
Graham Sutherland on holiday with Peter Watson, John Craxton and Kathleen Sutherland
Three petals on white
Camouflage in shadow
Greens with blacks
Entrance to a lane
The picnic hamper is somewhere other
Of the gesture yawned at
By the overlapping seas
Waving in the settling sun
Who is to say
Let things come to rest
Or who is to say
Let things come otherwise
Wilder curves, smaller moons engulfed by flora and fauna
What with the pleurisy and reading Rimbaud & Blake
No longer now composing
No longer now with pen in hand
Moonlit in the ruins, the serpent of a tree
Archway to a brighter place, with a bird catcher and a poet
They stand guard, in tight leggings and slippers, it is a complicated pose
More time now to ponder, though still to wear the hat
All thoughts for the mind to wander
It's here they're fair isle flew
A mountain range, a far away vision
Still the leggings and the slipper style of shoe
The whiteness in the eyes, mindful or insane
Either way it is back-along
Far and away beyond my view
It must have been great fun
In the rowing boat or the canoes
Placing those heads just on top of the water
Anchored, were they anchored?
To the floor of the lake, to the mud
Loved by the ducklings
Did you supervise in person?
Or where you on the end of a telephone
Available, whenever
Did you visit in the sunshine?
Or did you send your blessings
In Absentia
From over the pond
Mallards in flight
The round bird spreads its wings
Over the Daughters of Uranus
The rippled water
Is sliced beneath a sun shone dust cloud sky
It is warm sat on the banking
The ducks quack and ruffle malodorously
Life does not wear as well
As the words
Of wasted afternoons
