MOVING PICTURES

Time to move the stack of paintings

from behind the lounge where they lent

like pensioners against the wall

clad only in a shroud.

No sign of life: all dead?

Time to rehabilitate or bury,

hang them or put them in the shed.

One was a rural scene

into which you might escape

on a morning when the porridge

has horrible lumps, the coffee is weak

enough to make you weep,

the rain sogging

the thin tissues of poor sleep.

Another has a badly broken frame.

Painted decades ago in oil

it’s of a Parisian boulevard

that he and she may have walked

or maybe not – if only just

perhaps a dream –

a painting for the lost.

A third, disheartening in its loss of colour,

was of children playing on a beach

in swimwear of the ‘30s. 

Does it really matter

which wall, which shed?

the fact is very simple:

the children like the pictures are all dead.

LORD, HOW?

Turquoise has visited this island and spread its table in a lagoon

of fish and turtles behind a coral wall,

nourishment for the bodies and souls of the dying.

The clearest possible skies invite speculation and at night,

beyond the moon in hiding and absent city lights,

the same skies allow starlight unimpeded access

to respond with more questions, deeper inquiries born of quiet grief,

to the questions asked by those whose time is short.

For this is the island of palliative care with cushions for the weary –

a slow and gentle ride (no speed over twenty) –

for those whose illness has taken command,

boats for slow rowing across quiet waters inside the coral reef.

There’s nothing to do without a mobile phone,

life without email. This is a place where slow cycling

and recycling claim the hour, mutton birds and woodhens and palms

indifferent to the passing of those on vacation –

two weeks, then home after tasting the disengagement of the terminal. 

The airstrip is not well suited for landing in a storm.