Two
poems from Pippa Little's Between One and None
followed
by a note on the author
Her
Spar Box
No
matter the soap
Or scrubbing, he smelled of damp.
Whiskers hiding a small chin,
An unready smile.
Knuckles criss-crossed blue,
Old cuts stitched in coal.
This spar box he'd made from planks
Fetched from the pit-head,
Nails not straight, a pitman's botch,
But solid, with a good heft.
She liked to breathe against its glass.
He'd often tell her, his plain, beloved daughter,
How he'd come upon each feldspar icicle,
Dogtooth crystal or geode's burst-out heart.
And she'd sometimes glimpse him there,
A wanderer through enchanted caves,
Filling his pockets for her
With sooty necklaces of light.
Skin
the Rabbit
Skin
the rabbit!
My mother would say
Jerking a neck hole
Up over my head.
Skin the rabbit!
She slickly prepared me
Ready-rolled
For bed.
Skin the rabbit!
Such a queer
Shiver
In what she said.
Skin the rabbit!
I was old
Before I saw one
Skinned, boned, bled.
©
Pippa Little was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
in 1958, and was educated at Essex University and Queen Mary's
College, University of London. She lives in Northumberland,
where she works as a writer, teacher, editor and translator.
Her poetry has appeared in the following anthologies, In
the Gold of Flesh (Women's Press), Transformations
(Rivelin Grapheme), New Chatto Poets, Gregory Poets
(Carcanet), and Morden Tower, and her poetry and short
stories have also appeared in numerous journals, amongst them
Poetry Review, Other Poetry, Iron, Magma, North, Writing
Women, Sand (featured poet) Orbis (featured poet),
New Edinburgh Review, Feminist Review, Coffee House Poetry.
Pippa has been poetry editor on two Virago anthologies and
co-editor/co-translator of Hungarian poetry, and she has received
the Young Scots Poet Award (from Edwin Morgan), the Eric
Gregory Award, and a Northern Arts Award, and she was mentee
of Gilliant Allnutt on the Royal Literary Fund's Writer's Pool
programme.
"Her
Spar Box" was a commended poem in the Second Light Network's
poetry competition in 2004, and first appeared in their newsletter
that year.
