Poem by Peter Malin for 5th October

Object     Ennui, painting by Walter Sickert (1917-18)

Gallery 63      Sickert and his Contemporaries

Poem

All Over

The scene’s mundane, banal; love’s at an end

In this drab room

Whose sickly décor wears the ochre hues

Of autumn’s fading.

Here we view this man, this woman,

Studiously absent from each other’s gaze,

Reiterating their thoughts’ tormented libretti

As the room plays and replays

Its sullen symphony of brown.

SHE: We thought love star-begotten, angel-blest,

Needless of nurture: lovers’ grained-in fault;

And so we squandered starlight unconfessed,

Smudged its bright promise to this yellowed vault

Where, joined but separate in the artist’s eye,

We thank our stars there’s nothing left alive to die.

HE:   My gaze aspires to space’s lightless vault,

Aches for the joy of universal dark,

Thinks to oblivion all that was my fault

In snuffing, quenching, love’s defenceless spark.

The artist’s palette paints our lives to brown,

But cannot limn the void where, lost and deep, we drown.