Afterwards

Echoes engraved on troubled minds

A shepherd sits under a quarter moon, the story fits in three small rooms

Words taken as a bough

Or a row of branches, barely in leaf, echoes of a troubled time, shadows of relief

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Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)

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

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Postcard

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

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Landscape 1941, 1942, 1943

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

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Head and Shoulders (Missing)

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

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