“A huge banner displaying what is believed to be the UK’s largest printed poem has been unveiled on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Spiral, by Elizabeth Burns, has been reproduced on a 25 by eight metre sign to mark National Poetry Day and will stay until next summer. The poet, a descendant of the Robert Burns family, died in August aged 57. Her family said it was a poignant moment when they saw her work displayed on the poster on Thursday.”" (8th October 2015). More at… BBC news, East Fife.
 
Obituary at Lapidus
 
An article in memory of Elizabeth Burns is published in ARTEMISpoetry, Issue 15 (Second Light Publications, Nov 2015).
 

This Life

After the endless journey in airless heat
you emerge at last from the underground
and here at the newsagent’s next to the station
are bunches of sweet peas, wrapped in pink tissue:
 
you buy some, and bury your face as you walk,
sun and wind on your skin, in butterfly petals,
pale pinks and lilacs, white, their summer smell –
as if you were returning from the underworld
 
to find the meadows blossoming once more.
Each life echoing, acting out these myths:
going into darkness, re-emerging, wounds
and griefs healed over, the luscious world
 
still there, offering itself up to us over and over
again: not an afterlife, not something dangled
in the future – those fields of asphodels – with absences,
abstractions, but this life with its city streets,
 
its fizz and mix and mess, its rush of sweet pea scent,
the lightness of their petals, their brief and lovely bloom.
 

Elizabeth Burns

in collection, Held, 2010, Polygon,
ISBN 978-1-8469717-0-9