Derek Jarman’s Death
oil on photocopy on canvas, 1993
You can’t see the headlines in black, white
underneath: gay plague
scourge
vile doom
you feel them
melted under the shock
of cadmium red deep, cerulean
manganese, marigold
chrome green
pure flesh, raw
umber
trenches gouged
by the living fingers of the artist
scraping a cross
Death
the canvas still shakes
—Lynn Caldwell
Lynn Caldwell’s poems hold fragments of her life on the west coast of Canada, in continental Europe and now in Dublin. They have found homes for themselves in Crosswinds Poetry Journal, the Irish Times, Aurora Poetry Journal, Crannog, and the Dedalus Press anthology Writing Home, among other places.
