"Little Red Cap" by Carol Ann Duffy

Little Red Cap

Carol Ann Duffy

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?1

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 hope 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

Source: http://genius.com/Carol-ann-duffy-little-red-cap-annotated