Showing Death (Poetry)

For Damien Hirst

You show what death is made of — absence, disbelief,
a case of what we’re most afraid of — a void in sharp relief.
Clinical the caption, angular the frame,
containing what was human — a face without a name.

The photograph’s precision a measure of cold skill,
the corpse a hollow chamber, vacated at the kill.
The camera feels the bullet, the lens perceives the gun,
distant, slight as shadows narrowed by the sun.

Death by demonstration, an abstract, bloody form,
a chilling contradiction of what was live and warm.
The visual clue turns cryptic, obscure in its appeal,
when suicide’s artistic the real becomes surreal —

an uneasy fascination triggered by conceit —
the art of death compelling, the composition neat,
bizarre in contemplation, the rumour seeming true,
the body a strange landscape — a sick and silent view

too ugly for the purist, too tidy for the ghoul,
the critic plays it clever for fear he’ll look a fool.
The wiser man is honest and lets his interest show,
you capture Death in profile — that’s all we living know.