Surface Tension
On Derek Southall's Blackwater Recalled - Four Years After (1969) *

And, severance: a dreadful U,
carved from a block of night. Flicker
and swim of country bonfire light,
and past that moving on the face
of the waters. From underneath,

the bleeding. What does this ice-lid
scatter in the fields? Time becomes
the strata resisting footsteps,
the pulse of a camera shutter.
My homes echo with ripples, strokes;

crack with the black puncture of grief.


*This painting, which can be viewed at the Herbert Gallery in Southall's home-town of Coventry, was a reaction to the death of his brother in 1965, who drowned in a frozen lake at Blackwater in Hampshire, my family's home county.