AFTER CANCER TREATMENT

The language of this new country is broken branches. I am waiting to hear them speak. [...]

by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

The language of this new country
is broken branches.

I am waiting
to hear them speak.

Having scraped together
what music they could

here on the windswept ridge,
they have come down

in a gravity of leaves.
Here is the solid ground

surviving the storm.
Here is the opened air,

the more and the less
of catastrophe, the nest

unhatched, the clogged
mouth of the burrow.

I’ve only old words
to call new things.

I walk the littered path
which says kindling,

which says seed and sap.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick, poet and literary scholar, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Our Held Animal Breath (2012), which was selected by poet Chard DeNiord for the NC Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award.

She is also the editor of two collections of essays on Irish writers, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (University of Alabama Press, 2000) and, with Borbála Faragó, Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2015).

Find out more here.

AFTER CANCER TREATMENT

by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Monika Kozak