Elizabeth Gibson

IS THIS HOW IT ENDS

After the painting ‘Funeral of a Viking’ by Frank Dicksee, in Manchester Art Gallery

Water has not changed, all this time. Nor has fire, how it moves.

Metal has not changed, how it catches the reflection of fire,

crunches and clicks to your bone-deep tunes.

Fabric has not changed; see it swelling with water, crumpling

around legs, how damp and cold and skin become the same,

bare you, make you carry more than yourself.

This sky is still seen, through rarely: sooty clouds teasing thick,

gritty air. The pale green just visible underneath, that light

beyond light, soon to be out - I know that green.

We still have pebble beaches, after years of taking and dropping.

We have sand left that is safe for our children to play on,

and fishes and shrimps not yet streaked with poison.

We are on the brink. Sometimes our orb tips, and everything swirls.

For years, we watched disasters of water and fire ravage

those that we saw as outside of our gilded gold frame.

Would we still walk to the sea to honour the blaze of the end,

the heat and spit and oil of it? Can we still say goodbye?

Do we believe we are going, staying, transforming?

The icy water is krakening outwards, engulfing me. My teeth itch

with salt. Night is coming at us, ever faster. A bright eye

gleams briefly on the horizon and then is gone.

Elizabeth Gibson (they/them) is a queer, neurodivergent poet, performer, and facilitator from Wigan, based in Manchester. Their poems have appeared in Atrium, Banshee, Butcher's Dog, Dust Poetry, Lighthouse, Magma, Modron, The North, and Under the Radar, as well as the young adult anthologies He, She, They, Us and You're Never Too Much from Pan Macmillan. Elizabeth's debut poetry collection is A love the weight of an animal (Confingo, July 2025).

Elizabeth provided this comment about their poem:

I was inspired by the oil painting “Funeral of a Viking” by Frank Dicksee in Manchester Art Gallery. I was struck by how the sea, sky, and pebbles on the beach all looked the same to me as those that I see now, despite the painting being over a century old and the time period depicted being a thousand years ago. It made me realise how constant and beautiful nature is, and how we can trace threads of humanity back through these characters through elements like the feeling of wet clothing and the concept of honouring the dead. However, we are rapidly destroying nature and each other, and it feels like we are getting closer and closer to oblivion, which I hint at towards the end of the poem.