Guest Poems

Edward Burra: Never Tell Anybody Anything

In the end
I gave up on people, my layered clowns,
my boxers’ lips, my stroke-struck faces. Instead
I painted their standing gravestones, the long slicks
of their tracks across the landscape. Sometimes,
despite my best attempts, their limbs
would break the soil: the ricket
legs of pylons, the bloom of mouths
on the fronts of trucks, soft bones splitting
the taut skin of a grey snake river. Slowly,
while my hand thinned and dried around the brush,
I rendered down their bodies into great stones
whose roots leaked out into a silent
landscape.

Then there was only what
there had always been. The paint, the paper
laid out flat along the table. Hardboard
at the window, shuttering the populated view.
The water in the glass jar, darkening.

Edward Burra (1905-1976) was known for his vivid paintings of the 1920s and later cosmopolitan society. In later life his health confined him to painting in his room.

Red Hares

When I think of the hare
some raggedy, angular grace
races through my mind.

It comes unlooked for
when chatting of nothing,
rounding an August cornfield hedge,

up and away across sharp stubble,
square to the ground in an upright scurry,
arcing its route to distant shadows.

And it may be years
before I see one again,
coming to us down a lane,

picking a way before slowed traffic,
high banks lowering on either side.
It stops and then comes on again,

a remembered wilderness in its eye,
bringing back the hares of childhood
under pylons, fizzing cables.

Before sun sank and ghosted the field,
we squinted to catch a final glimpse,
their run over hummocks of fiery light.