Please Step Aside So I can Write About the Living
You need to get the dead out of your poems
you told me but here I am writing of how
a month before you left this earth
we stood together in the gallery and I saw you reflected
in the fictive space of a painting
your form, gleaming white and translucent
as thin frost, or a sleek gauze
floating on the back glass as if airborne
a premature, amorphous haunting
your ghost getting here ahead of you.
You, see-through, overlay an oil sky
which takes up almost all the canvas
a deep hued emptiness which consumes the artist’s vision.
In that huge starless heaven
a white dwelling is as diminished
as a tooth in a cavernous mouth
a moth flying in space.
Your steps are so light
as you walk nearer to me.
How brave to paint so much darkness, you say.
.
Anna is a published poet, the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck (Pindrop Press), Kissing the She Bear (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and The Fox (Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo Dreams) .
Anna is also the Executive Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival and works as a creative writing tutor and mentor, a Communications Specialist, a journalist, broadcaster and a copywriter/editor. Her website: https://annasaunderswriter.co.uk/
Abegail Morley 