Poem of the Month

Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe, Alice Oswald and David Harsent who respond to works from the Tate Collection.
The first poem to appear is John Burnside’s beautiful meditation on John Nash’s evocative wartime landscape The Cornfield 1918, currently on display at Tate Liverpool.

CORNFIELD
After Jon Nash
Nothing is as it was
in childhood, when we had to learn the names
of objects and colours,
and yet the eye can navigate a field,
loving the way a random stook of corn
is orphaned
- not by shadows; not by light -
but softly, like the tinder in a children’s
story-book, the stalled world raised to life
around a spark: that tenderness in presence,
pale as the flame a sniper waits to catch
across the yards of razor-wire and ditching;
thin as the light that falls from chapel doors,
so everything, it seems,
is resurrected;
not for a moment, not in the sway of the now,
but always,
as the evening we can see
is all the others, all of history:
the man climbing up from the tomb
in a mantle of sulphur,
the struck match whiting his hands
in a blister of light.