as always Leonardo your notes revealed less of yourself

though the unborn child

in the open fob-case

of the uterus

was artist-shy

you still sketched

his placental history

of nourishment and oxygen

in a botanical way

behind long shallow sunlight

I study your work

and remember my post-partum dreams

and how I startled

and fell where the air

was too thin for birds

in any language we think of him

when the mouth

of the sky

opens over the

fields of Eastern

Ukraine and 298

bodies fall under

the wheels of

sunflowers a farmer

forgets everything his

shirt his horse

his name and

like a translator

he points to

a rosary tangled

in white angelica 

Kerrin P. Sharpe

Kerrin P. Sharpe’s first book, three days in a wishing well, was published by VUP in 2012. Her work appeared in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet). Another book, there’s a medical name for this, was published August 2014 (VUP). A third collection, rabbit rabbit, is in progress with a grant from Creative New Zealand.