Little Red Cap 2020
Ever since being introduced to the work of British poet Carol Ann Duffy in secondary school English Literature class, I have been competely obsessed with her work. In particular the way she conjures up detailed imagery with her words. Her poem Little Red Cap published in 1999 within her collection of poems entitled The World’s wife, wherein Duffy reimagines well known female figures, is one of my favourites. In Little Red Cap she retells the classic story of little red riding hood with the wolf presented as a dominant older man, and little red riding hood an impressionable young girl. I decided to illustrate each stanza and create a book of the combined poetry and images.
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out Into playing fields, the factory, allotments Kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men The silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan Till you came at last to the edge of the woods It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud In his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me Sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink
My first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods Away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place Lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake My stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer Snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
But got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night Breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for What little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws And went in search of a living bird – white dove –
Which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said Licking his chops.
As soon as he slept, I crept to the back Of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood
But then I was young – and it took ten years In the woods to tell that a mushroom Stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds Are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf Howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out Season after season, same rhyme, same reason.
I took an axe To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon To see how it leapt
I took an axe to the wolf As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones I filled his old belly with stones.
I stitched him up Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone
