Poetry 14 August 2017 On its way to lace A new poem by Craig Raine. Photo: Getty Sign UpGet the New Statesman\'s Morning Call email. Sign-up I am flying at night. Pins and needles waiting in my iPhone. Then the sadness of landing gear swallowing the lump in its throat. Dim the cabin lights. My phone is dying. Venice in blackface, raining and gleaming. The lagoon tonight like patent leather dancing pumps. A seagull’s umbrella feet. Its irritable beak. Each litter bin a sarcastic cornucopia. Trees on Sant’Elena. Trees at Treviso. The beauty of this dying, the leaf on its way to lace. See, the sick greens’ pallor. Look, the slow release of colours, pale lemons, sauternes, cod liver oil capsules, rusts, ground coffee beans, lucozades, irn bru, bright Colman’s mustard, drab Dijon mustard, Dover sole, freckles, keratoses, the blush of old cricket balls, the rouges of gout, sunsets, bloods, brash burglar alarms, lavender bruises, Fonseca port. The leaves turn, they turn away also, they turn from us, the leaves, so that we shall know this once, for once, the world we have we have to lose. Craig Raine’s latest book is “My Grandmother’s Glass Eye: a Look at Poetry” (Atlantic) › The Power and the Story: fact, fabrication and the shaping of the modern media This article appears in the 10 August 2017 issue of the New Statesman, France’s new Napoleon