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Full Moon
29 Jun 2026
Barnaby
Harsent
From, to
After Francis Bacon’s
Study from the Human Body (1949)
His body mid-sentence,
the grammar of form.
Muscle pulls against the stroke,
shoulder and flank drawn tight.
A body braced against itself –
hinge and tension shaped by grain.
While further down, skin recedes
into a curtain’s darkest folds,
forgetting its duty to hold,
running thin like old blood,
ribboning in what remains of light.
What seems like shadow
is movement captured, held just so.
Something like desire, just under the skim.
Behind the poem...
The inspiration for this poem, one of several I’ve written after Francis Bacon, lies (in part at least) in the movement the artist manages to convey while maintaining such profound stillness in his Study from the Human Body. This seeming contradiction in Bacon’s work fascinates me. It’s as if he’s painting ghosts, but ghosts charged with translucent power and kinetic potential – figures that seem to scream silence.