for K.M. Grant
She is away.
The feathers in my eye spoke outwards.
She is the accident that happens.
The sun bursts hazel on my shoulders.
She is the point of any sky.
Come here, here, here:
if it’s a tree you’d sulk in, I am pine,
if earth, I’m risen terracotta;
if it’s all to air you’d turn, turn to me.
You are flying inside me.
Seventy times her weight,
I stand fast.
My hand is blunt and steady.
She is fierce and sure:
lands, scores, punctures the gloveskin.
And why I asked
for spirals stitched where she might perch:
fjord blue, holm green, scarlet, sand,
like her bloodline, Iceland to Arabia:
because her hooded world’s my hand -
Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo is available for purchase here.
‘Handfast’ by Vahni Capildeo (Measures of Expatriation,2016) is copyrighted and reprinted here by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, UK.
