Next Sunday, Kate Cayley will be coming to Guelph to read at an event co-hosted by the Eden Mills Festival and Publication Studio Guelph. She’s a tremendous talent — an award-winning fiction writer, playwright, and poet. Her short story collection, How You Were Born, won the 2015 Trillium Book Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the ReLit Award. Her first collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End, was shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and her young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror, won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. Kate’s currently touring her new poetry collection Other Houses and we’re so pleased to be able to feature an excerpt from it on The Oddments Tray.
Pied Piper: The Children, Leaving, Sing to Their Parents
Why are you surprised?
We heard
a singing in the wood.
Our eyes are brighter than the rats. We, too,
are built of curiosity and appetite, we vibrate
what we touch, how could we not
follow the man in patches,
leaving you excavated,
your streets
quiet as you wished for.
We’ve made ourselves now,
following the pipe, the door
that opens in the hill, which you
hung back from, cowards. You were made
to make us, nothing else.
Write our names in the window each night.
Inscribed in churches, and furtively in the kitchen steam
the kettle makes against the glass. Etch us
on the hollow glass of your own hearts.
Don’t look for us, though. We don’t look for you.
(written by Kate Cayley, read by Chioke I'Anson)
That rad music you hear at the end is by Tigerrosa. Buy their debut album here
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