Lotte Kramer
‘Woman at the Window’
Caspar David Friedrich, 1822
You want to cup the oval of her head,
The hair piled up and neatly pinned to it,
The ears exposed beside the nape of the neck.
The sloping shoulders gathered in the sleeves,
High-waisted pleats fall down in gentleness
To shroud her body to the ankle’s edge.
And so she leans against the window sill,
A longing gesture takes us out with her
Into the harbour, hardly visible.
Some uprights tell of masts in dove-grey light.
She dreams, perhaps, of distant other worlds
While slippers firmly tread the wooden floor.
Lotte Kramer came to England with a Kindertransport in 1939. She began to write in the 1970s and is widely published in England and abroad. She has published nine collections, one bilingual in Germany. The most recent is The Phantom Lane, Selected and New Poems, from Rockingham Press.
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