With plastic teardrops on soft fingertips,
we hot-glue multicoloured craft feathers
to a cut-out frame. I stick and she snips
semiplumes to lay, each slightly longer
until it is time for ones washed and dried:
snowy seagull contour and flight feathers
we collected together at low-tide
along with mottled plumes from the plover.
Nearly there, we bend them in a gentle
curve to look like the wings of a real bird,
and use glitter duct-tape guided by pencil
marks to attach braided straps to matboard.
She raises one arm up, then the other —
Unaware, I fasten wings on my child’s shoulders
[First Published: Not The Time To Be Silent Anthology, 2022]
Lauren O’Donovan is an Irish writer. In 2023, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, and was runner-up for Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition and the Listowel Writers’ Week Collection Award. She is fortunate to have her work published often in journals and anthologies. https://twitter.com/LaurenODonovanW https://www.facebook.com/laurenodonovanw