Isobel Dixon
Isolated Being
Wraith-woman
poised and still, emerging
from cool blue, the pale beyond.
Come contemplate serenity:
such whiteness, innocence,
a veil of purity
about a shadow wedge of sex.
Nun-cloud, she-mist,
she seems immaculate
at first. She breathes herself
into the sky; the borders fogged,
object and aura found as one.
But what’s been scraped
about her womb?
What’s wound and knotted
at the core, rough,
candy-striped and corporal?
A clot, a scar, the tracings
of opaque experience.
And still she floats,
bearing these secrets quietly.
One woman, lone against blue heaven.
Note: After the painting of the same name by Irish artist Louis le Brocquy
Isobel Dixon was born in South Africa, studied in Edinburgh and now works in London as a literary agent. Her poetry has been widely published in South Africa, where she won the Sanlam Literary Award 2000 for her collection Weather Eye (Carapace, 2001). Her poems have also appeared in the Unfold pamphlet, the British Council New Writing anthologies (8, 10 and 11), and in Poetry Salzburg's Imagination in a Troubled Space: A Contemporary South African Reader (2004).
Page(s) 12
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