‘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’.
By David Selzer