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New
Moon
11 Sept 2026
David
Rutherford
Sep 26th
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Out of Nowhere
After Out of Nowhere
by Laura Lancaster
The summer has pulled us onto a blanket
The joy of kicking up a picnic, not as a bully would,
but as a celebration, as a cross between a blooming
and the falling moment of a paper ribbon
Because the woods are coming for me
with their disco lights. Because I am feeling
myself beginning to fizz theatrical, to gesture
a demand for a kind of quenching
Was it inevitable I would be the first
into the water, throwing mock bows,
moving fast from the biscuit dryness of feet?
If so, was that from always, from the time
of the merest gathering up of names?
Was I a fountain since forever,
or only from after the first garble
of rumour of this day together?
Behind the poem...
My poem shares its title with Laura Lancaster’s Out of Nowhere: a painting conveying both warmth and strangeness – the familiar, and the unknowable. I admire how Lancaster subverts the typical expectations of portraiture by investing her subjects with a sense of motion. It’s as if they ’re held, momentarily, in the act of bursting out of stasis; as though our view is an instant, caught as we pass. The women depicted in this particular painting felt to me like more than just figures. I could see and hear them as characters, and wanted to explore their voices, as well as the physical and emotional dynamics of the situation in which they’d been captured.