Katie Donovan

Bio: Katie Donovan is an Irish poet living in Dalkey, Co. Dublin. She has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books (UK). Her most recent, Off Duty was shortlisted for the Irish Times/Poetry Now Prize in 2017. She is a recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award (St. Paul, MN). Her work has been widely anthologised, notably in “The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry” (edited by Peggy O’Brien) and the best-selling “Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times” (edited by Neil Astley).

This Singular Horse

(20,000 year old art in Tito Bustillo Cave, Asturias, Spain)
“Women made most of the oldest known cave art paintings” - National Geographic, October, 2013
She left the lightfor the deeps inside the mountain,carrying black and violet dyes,crushed from whatever she could lay her hands on.
In her mind, the horse burned,urging her through serried pillars, medusa formations of weeping stone.She must have had a torch,a ladder to reach the ceiling,more than one companion.
As I retrace her journeythrough freezing caverns,I wonder about her children:as she painted,did she tell them stories,so they wouldn’t stray? They’d have been rivettedby tales of equine derring-do, and stolid oxen:the path of narrativelighting the vaults of their growing craniums.
A listening childmight not recallthis singular horse until years later:a chance ignitionrevealing the picture in all its buried, lonely splendor:
nostrils trembling,ready to breathe again.

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