Susan Darlington’s poetry regularly explores the female experience through nature-based symbolism and stories of transformation. It has appeared in Fragmented Voices, Dreams Walking, Re-Side and Anti-Heroin Chic among others. Her debut collection, ‘Under The Devil’s Moon’, was published by Penniless Press in 2015.
THE CAGE
She painted birds on the walls:
a goldfinch perched on the dado rail
and seven magpies caught in flight,
secrets hidden in their pinhole eyes.
She talks to them every day.
Uses a rigger to touch up their colours
when they start to fade; keeps them
from falling ill or growing old.
One Sunday, when the window was open,
a magpie peeled itself off the wall
and flew out before she could catch it.
The next day her mother died.
Now she keeps the casements locked
and has bricked up the front door;
swallowed the silver key that clatters
against her hollow bones when she moves.
We see her looking across the street
from inside her cage of yesterdays
as one white feather flutters down,
lands on the swell of her shoulder blade.
TRANSLATE THE NOTES
(“Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands” - Francesca Woodman)
And then one day
I didn’t even need the piano.
I swept its ivory keys
into the concert of my skin
and laid them in the caesura
between my vertebrae.
I cut the hammer strings
from the unwritten frame
and stretched them along
the steel line of my nerves
until my whole being vibrated
with translated notes.
I tightened the tuning pins
in my fingertips
and my body became music
under my touch
