The Uncloaked Crone by Hannah Linden

A large tree in the middle of green woodland. Large white text reads: The Uncloaked Crone. Smaller text reads: Discussing disabled characters in fairy tales and folklore.

If sex were a flower head, as it is meant to be,
I’d respond to sunlight better than to rain.
 
If only I could convert the positives in life
to food but I’ve always gorged on the past.
 
Maybe you’d have to have been a child whose
father died to understand. You take what you have
 
and weave story cloaks from them. I’d be
a sloe berry, best picked after the first frosts.
 
Have you ever noticed that moorland plants  
carry on growing however often the mists
 
entangle them? I’m woody now, thick-stemmed
and when I sway in the wind I rage up a ruckus
 
before my fruits fall. See those moor ponies
with their unfriendly ways? When I sing
 
into the cold, they nestle against my shoulders
and breathe their warmed air with mine.

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About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n