Ravilious went to our school. Imagine this.
He breathed its woody polished air; tumbled down
its stairs; lined up outside its masters’ rooms.
Enjoyed the spell of Latin, the pigeons on the roof,
the slap of balls on wood, of hands across the face.

At 12, he was escaping to the Downs, sketching 
Wilmington’s Long Man, and marvelling at stringy 
biplanes that danced the air. At his age, I helped 
weed its painted stones that pretended to be chalk, 
biked everywhere, made kits.  And waited for the trains 
to pass the gates that kept our Hampden Park
from his, but his brush would catch their steamy
progress, creeping from the city to the sea,
the countryside a quilt of grasses, people free.

On his wedding day he smiles.  A home movie
flicks the husband from the man. See him step
outside his watercolour shield.  And there is Tirzah
[really Eileen] a dark-eyed match in art and love.
Biography at last, to replace the misty strokes,
the shades and patterns of his hand, his character.

And here some are. The balanced scenes of bedrooms,
shops of curiosity, trees with winter branches
that lightning-stab the air. And then, as wartime
takes his hand, a frigate’s dazzle sides,
bold brass props a Henry Moore could shape,
a childlike fighter held to ground by storm. 
His appetite for art and war, had brought a commission
and commissions.  Tumbled into uniform, he can pass
above the terror and the pain, to see the shape
of the machine, the curves and angles that bring ends
and endings. Finally, he gets to fly above it all.
He leaves his wife at home recovering [a breast
removed] and, sent to Iceland, joins a rescue flight.

Is never seen again. There’s no sign of wreckage,
bodies or reports – only “missing in action”, which he was not
– and was. It takes a year for wartime Britain
to confirm he’s dead. Tirzah receives no pay
or pension till that day. His loss, and lost support,
becomes her spur. She remarries for one short and final
time. Poor Tirzah, once again abandoned, making more
of her own accomplishment, but also dead quite soon –
the cancer he had fled to Iceland from, coming home.

Even so, the vision that he shaped becomes the way
I see his time, and Sussex where I lived.
He fills lost landscapes with how things might have been,
presents war as not so violent as designed.

Though in his death an emptiness. The usual cry of
promise unfulfilled, of course – but there’s desertion
there as well, the life insisting to be let in to the art.

But still he went to our school. A place of exercises,
ringed caps and ink. He then escaped its rituals
for art. This and none of this we shared, for when I went,
into the Grammar School, he was long dead,
gone into that wartime ocean, passed twenty years.
Though his pictures modestly adorned our corridors
No one thought to mention him to we who followed on.
Art was banished to a stock room, brought out meekly,
once a week, as we strove for better things.