Ann Day
Portrait in Blue
watercolour by John Singer Sargent
The blue burnous of the Bedouin
burns behind the sunlit diorama of Brooklyn
on an August afternoon as we emerge,
blinking, from the dusk of the museum.
Almost a hundred summers
since those black eyes gazed out
from cobalt folds of fabric
over desert sand
and a young man washing the pure colour
of their garments onto paper.
Unconscious of their luck
at being rendered timeless, forever young
under the transparent saving grace
of glass and a light kept dimmer
than the desert’s,
these Arab tribesmen crossed
and recrossed the dunes of the Sahara
through years of heat and glare
until their skin greyed, their eyelids
puckered into slits and they were left
with little but exhaustion
except here, encased in simple frames,
where they stand erect, inquisitive,
perfected - stopped for all time
in the windless climate of applause.
Page(s) 19
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The