Reading back, just before melancholy
Flash forward to that second war
Of holidays and shepherds
With moons and trees, moons and trees
Artist, artisan, poet, musician or painter
You are one, whichever you breathe
Leave the washing and tobacco
Push the boats out into the sea
Sail along; holidays with shepherds
Under moons and seas
Sail along without of cause to grieve
Say belong; belong beneath the trees
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
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
