Rachel Carney

A humble cloak placed on the back of a donkey and made out of fragments of cloth

You are hopping about in the dirt, when you look up and spot him: legs splayed, rope taut, refusing to move, his back covered in old rags patched together. You hop closer, wings stretched out for balance. You can see that each tatty fragment of the cloak dangles like a tassel. Loose threads catch at the dust and the sunlight. Flies buzz around you both. He is still refusing to move. There are curses and a heavy stick. You can see that he has sores on his legs from earlier beatings. More flies are buzzing. His eyes are half-closed against the sun. He will not move. The cloak on his back is a colourful burden. It is also a gift. It is both your cloak, and his. Your poem, and his.

Rachel Carney is a poet, creative writing tutor and academic based in Cardiff. She has recently completed a PhD examining how ekphrastic poetry can help visitors to engage with art in museums. Her debut poetry collection, Octopus Mind, explores themes of perception, creativity, and neurodiversity, and was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023.

Rachel wrote the following about ‘A humble cloak placed on the back of a donkey and made out of fragments of cloth’:

The title of this poem comes from a definition of the original Greek word for the poetic form ‘cento’.* It immediately conjured up this strange little scene in my mind, and I began writing, with no idea of where the poem would lead me. The poem became a kind of visual question about the idea of literary ownership. Who owns a found poem? Does it belong to the poet, or to the reader? Or to the person who wrote the original text? What are the power dynamics at play here?

*Scott McGill and Scott C. McGill, ‘Tragic Vergil: Rewriting Vergil as a Tragedy in the Cento “Medea”’, The Classical World, 95.2 (2002), 143–61 (pp. 143–44) <https://doi.org/10.2307/4352647>.