Ritual
After David Hammons
The remarkable hours—
wading into a stranger's pool at dawn.
Like a manta ray—its mouth drawing in all that lays
before it: slow and steady and forever.
A woman selling snowballs after the blizzard; tightly
compacted, laid out in lines of diminishing size.
Like plastic sheeting flapping all night: something
that could uncurl with wings.
Wes Lee lives in Eastbourne. She has four poetry collections - her latest, Wearing Today, was shortlisted for The Kathleen Grattan Award 2023 (Otago University Press). Most recently she was awarded the Magma Editors' Prize 2024/25; the 2024 Free Verse Prize, by The Poetry Society, in London, and the Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women's Writing Prize 2022, in New South Wales.
