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.