WING
Friday, February 12th, 2010This is an excerpt from my poem, Wing
We find you, dear Wing,
in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets…
I played around a lot with the PIGLETS … taking this line in and out of the poem. But I realised that it was integral to the whole energy and emotion of the piece. It was the SOUND of the piglets snufflilng and snorting, and this sense of life and innocence they evoked I was chasing in the poem. I realised their inclusion was essential, without them I couldn’t HEAR that noise – and it was this Click through to see the video. Including this hyperlink and writing the poem up here helped create the draft. I wanted to create a poem with links, and in so doing I realised that that was an important step in creating the atmosphere of the piece.
a grey goose flaps overhead…
you are solid but unseen, mysterious
as a somersault inside the womb;
here, folded to a cup of hands,
plump as a wood pigeon
in the long, flat January grass
you are singular and intense
like a girl breathing quietly by a window,
her just-cut hair pressed against the glass.
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
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