Malevich

You put a pencilled square on a piece of paper,
And then a circle, off center, then two squares
Perfectly balanced, and the public cried out in terror:
We are lost.

At last, having purified the intellect beyond example,
You painted a white square, on a diagonal axis,
In cool white, on a background of warm white,
Calling it White on White.

Those were the morning days, after the great revolution,
When the poet stood on the platform without speaking,
And came down, saying: That was my poem,
Which is silence.

But the going was rough, and Lenin said:
This is a disorder of Leftism, let us have no more nonsense.
Movies are what we need, posters and book jackets,
And sets for the theatre.

Something must have gone wrong: it is the intellectuals
Who reject you now, it is the new smartness to laugh
At your sort of thing. Who better than a simple person
Could understand a square?

Martyr who died in bed, entirely artist,
The circle and the square are impregnable.
They will survive a great deal of talking,
And a good many laughs.

From Seventy Poems (Alan Swallow, 1965)