Poem
Karen McCarthy Woolf
WING
WING
WING
We find you, dear Wing,in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets,
your knuckle of raw bone
and streak of claw-white quills
torn from the socket.
A grey goose soars
up high where hot air-balloons drift
and the wind is a shape
to wrap yourself around
solid but unseen, 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.
© 2013, Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, )
The title poem of Karen McCarthy Woolf’s pamphlet – a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and New Statesman Book of the Year in 2006 – came about as a piece of serendipity: “I was sitting at my desk wondering what to write,” says the poet, “so I cut a Sharon fruit in half. The result was The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers.”
This attention and receptivity to the world around her – its...
This attention and receptivity to the world around her – its...
Poems
Poems of Karen McCarthy Woolf
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WING
We find you, dear Wing,in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets,
your knuckle of raw bone
and streak of claw-white quills
torn from the socket.
A grey goose soars
up high where hot air-balloons drift
and the wind is a shape
to wrap yourself around
solid but unseen, 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.
WING
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