Poetry by Susan Gordon Byron

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Stupendous Ruler Painter

after David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967)

I’m sorry not to make it to the Tate Modern
In ten years, it might as well be a century.

It’s Sunday morning and I pulling a hair from my head
Your masterpiece small on a wall in my head, acrylic and

A smell only smelling in my memory. Not a masterpiece
I decide, just that you were the first, being very old now.

I accept the bitterness of youth: A useful lemon bitterness. 
So many silver days clamped to a canvas. A bigger splash: 

There being no bodies makes me think intensely of bodies.
Skin must be conjured, an orbit of silver days across it. 

I hear a tune and it's the Beatles, a silver orbit measured in days. 
This. Desire, and the later-born audit of desire. 

---

Susan Gordon Byron is a non-fiction editor in London. Her poetry has appeared in Dust, tiny wren lit and Mechanics' Institute Review. Following a NCTJ postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism, she worked at the Catholic Herald for two years. She hosts The Culture Boar Podcast. You can find her on X @cultureboarpod