Scraped into canvas as France bleeds
into Verdun field
The Italian girl’s becoming
immortalised in her pose
Controlled by the painter’s eye
Her mask never slips
A stiff willow brushed with ink-dark tress
The olive-stained canvas leans in,
comforting her reticence
In hint of crossed hands-prayer
she stands half-starved of feeling
as tense as a violin chord
Coerced to a limit of painterly tension
He knows, He sees
She is his embodiment of elegy
When bodies were not allowed to speak
His brush a soft note of chaos,
an unravelling
Clare Lavery is a writer & lecturer. Interested in Languages, Identity and issues of migration and displacement from the victim's perspective, she tweets at @clerotto
