Pippa Little was born in Tanzania, raised in Scotland and now lives in Northumberland in the North East of England. She has worked as a university lecturer and tutor, a literacy development worker and as an editorial assistant and staff writer in publishing. In September 2015 she takes up a Royal Literary Fellowship at the University of Newcastle. Her collection Overwintering came out from OxfordPoets/Carcanet in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize.

Moon Watches Earth

She’s a whirl,
a well-head’s
surge of white,
which way
curls her feather-tail of storms?
Which tight twist
pulls clockwise
or wind-borne,
Coriolis to her equator?
How the crystals shiver
in her wedding hat
as she circle dances!
How small and silver-dented
are her sad tarantellas!

I am umbilical and dark.
Energies in me, deep-burned,
thrash unseen, grind themselves in.
I remember everything.
Turn and turn and turn,
snake-tail mouth in a Mobius spiral.
I want wild tides sometimes
to make me simple,
muscle-cut. Yet my nature
loves its treadling, these wonky spirals
almost surfacing beneath the skin.