Thursday, January 21, 2021

GAS Featured Poet: Susan Darlington

 


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

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