Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

Fresco – Fiona Sampson

Fresco

 

Those long-dead painters 
must have thought
it was impossible
to remake the world
however tender the flowers
and birds they left

lightly suspended 
in tempera
whose modest visible
brushstrokes are like
a hand put out to touch 
the other world

they inhabit now
or this painted world
that they re-enter
coming with us 
who stand waiting for us
in the doorway.

Posted:

in

Author:

Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson has received the Newdigate Prize, a Cholmondeley Award, Writer’s Awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales and the Society of Authors, various Poetry Book Society commendations, and international prizes in Macedonia and the US. She has twice been shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prizes. She is published in thirty-seven languages. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton. Her Selected Poems recently appeared in the US, China, Romania and Ukraine. Her latest collection The Catch (Chatto) was published in February 2016.