Drawing by Judith Wolfe
Mark Pirie

Two Poems


      A SASCHA AND HER MUM

      (Tate Modern 2005)

      it's a video/short film
      two characters involved:
      Sascha and her Mum
      so what happens? you ask

      well, it's in a bedroom
      and Sascha is being choked
      and wrestled across the floor
      it's a sign of their closeness

      and in between, there's a
      few smiles, some laughing,
      but not for long, then it's back
      to Mum choking, strangling Sascha

      are they showing us this
      to portray how we really are
      one minute: tender; the next:
      cruel?; whatever the roles

      familial or otherwise:
      I noticed quite a few people
      beginning to leave,
      feeling just a little sick.

      STRINDBERG

      (Tate Modern 2005)

      Painting, mostly of stormy
      seas and seascapes, signs of a madness
      the elements often at fury. In An Occult Diary

      he writes of his Inferno

      but only when he left his house
      and was confronted by people, the everyday.
      He hated the Swedish Establishment

      and, if you believe it, women - though he married

      three times, and to independent, ambitious ones.
      His life it seemed was 'difficult', (or was it him?),
      complicated by his intemperate mind,

      and beliefs. One of his photos

      shows him brandishing a cutlass,
      as if ready to fight, angry at the world,
      yet finding happiness in the green of trees, the deepest blue

      - that gap where earth meets sky: horizon.


Return to CONTENTS