New poem for you, should you fancy a shufty. This one was written a few days ago whilst on a Wolf At The Door writing retreat at Dhanakosa (the anchoring place of my spirit). It’s about my mother searching for lost contact lenses, something that seemed to happen on a daily basis through my childhood, although she swears it was a rare occurrence. Years (and soft contact lenses, and bifocals) later, my unearthed memories of this once-commonplace activity came back to me like hallucinations.
Contact Lens
My mother is blinking like an owl treading water.
She has spatchcocked her palms, is strip-searching
the carpet, patting the sofa down, looking for her sight.
The world, transparent and the size of her pinkie-tip,
has fallen out of her eye and now, out of malice,
it will not be found. Or worse, it has sailed away,
intrepid coracle, to the dark side of her eyeball.
She tents her lid by its guy-rope lashes. I see inside her
it’s as red as a desert noon. A morbid rolling
hoves the fugitive into view. Retrieved, she lathers it
with spitwash, pinions again her Clockwork Orange eye,
and deftly launches the tissue-thin glass bowl. It floats,
meniscus on meniscus, world upon world.
Kirsten Luckins 