Poem

Kay Ryan

Side by side

CUT OUT FOR IT

Cut out
as a horse
is cut
from the
pack. Peeled
off, but
a long time
back. Now
such a feeling
for the way
they touch
and shift
as one, the
beauty when
they run.

Kay Ryan

(United States of America, 1954)

Many of Ryan’s poems follow a similar formula: the lines are short, there are few of them, and they are held together by frequent internal rhyming and unusual, powerful imagery. Small and mighty, one might say, they pull you closer to the page. ‘A Ball Rolls On a Point’ follows a “ball/ of who we are” as it rolls through a “fibrous jungle”. The jungle, like life, is full of unforeseen, unprovok...

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Poems of Kay Ryan

CUT OUT FOR IT

Cut out
as a horse
is cut
from the
pack. Peeled
off, but
a long time
back. Now
such a feeling
for the way
they touch
and shift
as one, the
beauty when
they run.

From: Poetry, Vol. 191, No. 4, January