You couldn’t call them scissors in her hands if the clashed
swords of scissors slash and shear her blades whispered through a void
of thick black paper their strokings calling up paddlers
and plodders gallopers and swoopers spelling lions
from mane-shaped cursive sweeps Baghdad minarets from strips
of lacy trim and Cinderella’s poverty from
a ragged hem her art not merely deft fingerwork
but transmigration of souls her own into stone rounds
of tracery or the muscular vertical of
an eagle taking wing and the beholder’s into
a genesis that turned tapered shadows to rosy
flesh of thigh and flank grey stripes to sunlight and the gap
between pose and pose to limbs in action while she fled
the Nazis’ impenetrable shade the stick-figures
pushed into ovens the metal silhouettes of tanks
treading Aladdin’s sands her most moving creations
weightless not with absence but with the magical flights
of bodies wholly grounded in the passage of light.
*Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) invented silhouette animation, cutting out shadow figures and sets for silent films
(The Adventures of Prince Achmed, The Magic Flute) and for her many short features based on Grimms’ fairy tales.