The 2013 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival runs for the 8th-10th November and this weekend Ink Sweat & Tears is featuring poems on the theme of ‘Beauty’ which is the subject of the IS&T-supported Discussions and Short Takes this year. Find out more about the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival here
Veil
My mother found her mother’s bridal veil
wrapped around a worthless china figurine.
Spiders had added their lace to it,
old newspapers left their stains.
A bee-hive heap of bandages,
only good now for Halloween.
For years there has been this wound
that has gone untreated and undressed.
Richie McCaffery was born in Newcastle in 1986. He is the recipient of a Carnegie scholarship as well as the recipient of an Arts Trust of Scotland ‘Edwin Morgan travel bursary’ and a Hawthornden fellowship. HappenStance Press published his first collection Spinning Plates, in 2012. His poems have also been anthologised in Todd Swift’s Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam and Salt’s Best British Poetry 2012, edited by Sasha Dugdale. Read and interview with Richie here.