Goldfinch
Before the birth I chose
the fattest novel I could find –
a weighty, stiff-backed thriller
about a painting
of a wild tethered bird.
I tucked it in my hospital bag,
imagined nesting, feeding,
flitting in and out of worlds –
a chapter or two while he slept.
The following months brought
an unseasonal snow
of muslin cloths.
The land was sore.
My book lay pristine
with dust:
a plot of little bones,
light as plumage;
of hunger, flushed and gold.
Note: See Carel Fabritius’s painting, The Goldfinch (1654) and Donna Tartt’s 2014
novel of the same title.
Mandala
After Max Ernst’s painting
Día de los Muertos.
Day two.
Leonora in her studio
in Colonia Roma
sets down her brush,
picks up a ripe orange.
She presses a smeared thumbnail
into its dimpled skin –
citrus-cold,
the colour of the earth’s core.
She drops it:
a painted stone
or skull
going down
in night water.
The luminous plunge
is fossilised
and concentric.
Impossibly round.
There it hangs:
the kindly oil lamp
of an anglerfish,
tattooed sun
of quietude
and chaos
Note: Día de los Muertos is the Mexican Festival of the Dead.
_______________
Laura Wainwright is from Newport, South Wales. She is author of New Territories in
Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930-49 (University of Wales Press, 2018). She was
shortlisted in the Bridport Prize poetry competition in 2013 and 2019, and awarded a
Literature Wales Writer’s bursary for her poetry in 2020.
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