Guest Poem by Roberta Dewa

Roberta Dewa is a poet and fiction writer, with a short story in Salt’s Best of British 2021. She has had poems published in Acumen, Obsessed with Pipework, Staple, Fin, and has been commended and longlisted in the Aurora Writing Competition. She finds inspiration in the countryside, as well as in the work of artists and other writers. She is working on her first collection. This poem is from Acumen 113.

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.