Taxol

Wing-clipped. This rite of passage has cut a path from shoulder blade to rib-cage, moved muscle, removed that part of me lately defined undesirable, undesired. The scars will fade. Inside, living tissue twists and stretches, finds ways to accommodate a new anatomy [...]

by Lorna Shaughnessy

Wing-clipped.
This rite of passage has cut a path
from shoulder blade to rib-cage,
moved muscle, removed
that part of me lately defined undesirable,
undesired.

The scars will fade.
Inside, living tissue twists and stretches,
finds ways to accommodate a new anatomy,
as the hawthorn bows to Atlantic gales,
wind-warped,
forsaking symmetry for survival.

Lorna Shaughnessy

Lorna Shaughnessy has published four poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees, Anchored, and Lark Water (Salmon Poetry) as well as a pamphlet, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (Lapwing). In 2018 she was awarded an Artist’s Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland and in 2021 an Agility Award to fund the making of short poetry films.

Her monologues on the story of Iphigenia were staged in Cúirt International Literature Festival in 2017, in the Heaney HomePlace in 2018. This was subsequently adapted for video in 2021 and screened in the Winter Warmers Festival Nov 2021.

She lectures in Hispanic Studies in NUI Galway and translates Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry. With Keith Payne and Martín Veiga, she co-edited the anthology of Irish and Galician ecopoetry, A Different Eden (Dedalus Press 2021).