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  • Beautiful mind
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Beautiful mind

Elizabeth Burns

The things inside his mind are blurring
and drifting like snow, they are settling
into great heaps, burying whatever lay there.
May there be moments that feel as if they were lifted
from his granddaughter’s collage of autumn:

the three pairs of pale gold sycamore wings, perhaps,
with their flying birdshapes echoing one another;
the bend and swoop and line of reddened leaf-stems,
or else the copper beech leaves, so exactly placed,
the white space clear between them, perfect as snow.


Elizabeth Burns

from Held (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010)

Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Tags:

ageing memory
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Elizabeth Burns1957 - 2015

Having spent much of her life in Scotland, Elizabeth Burns latterly lived in Lancaster where she taught creative writing.
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