‘I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above…’

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH, W.B. Yeats

 

For David Press

 

One of the pitman painters from Ashington,

Jimmy Floyd, explained that he had depicted

the shed in a painting green like the grass

because he had run out of yellow

the intended colour. Better the wrong shade

than an allotment without a shed.

 

***

 

According to Gertrude Stein, that mistress

of ironies, the real and only reason

for Picasso’s Blue Period was

he had a lot of blue paint left over –

though the barefoot trio in the ‘Tragedy’

on that chill shore would be wretched and hopeless

in any colour from the spectrum: a man,

a woman, a child, the little boy

touching his father with one hand, the other

stretched towards his mother, who stands head bowed,

a little apart, watched helplessly by the man.

 

***

 

The poet, Refaat Alareer,

who was killed in an Israeli air strike,

foresaw his death. His last poem begins:

‘If I must die’. He says that after his death

‘you must live/to tell my story/to sell

my things/to buy a piece of cloth/and some strings’

and make a white kite ‘with a long tail’

so that a fatherless child in Gaza –

‘awaiting his dad who left in a blaze’ –

might look up, and momentarily

imagine ‘an angel is there’.