Man in a Room
after Interior at Paddington  – Lucian Freud.

Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?

Or the man with a stare
glassy-eyed behind spectacles,
fixed into absence
or challenging the viewer.

He inhabits, but barely, the slovenly mackintosh,
a cigarette hardly held, unlit,
the only suggestion of purpose
his curled fist of yellow fingers.
Can this be a home, sordid,
uncared for, or just a waiting room
where he stands in a purgatorial present?

In fear perhaps of the loiterer under a gas lamp,
boy or man undefined,
seeming absorbed into the street wall,
looking up to the window grille-
– this no protection from the imagined
or real.

Sheila Saunders graduated from St Anne’s College, Oxford, with a degree in English Language and Literature, and since then worked as a reporter on local weekly and daily newspapers in Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire. She has always loved theatre, music and art, but it is her observation and fascination with her natural surroundings, including the wildlife of the coast, that has inspired most of her poetry. Her poems have been published in journals including As It Ought to Be and Words for the Wild.