WING Poem by Karen McCarthy Woolf

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.