Category: Poetry

39 Degrees

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39 degrees

 

Today I could cook my breakfast

on the pavement, spitting there,

between the doc ends and

discarded cheap-lager cans. Save

 

on the energy bills, al fresco

cuisine – dine with the homeless. The

eggs would gaze up at me like that

woman’s breasts sweating in her

 

Lycra, skimpy top. The sun has

hit pasty limbs hanging from

cheap shorts, chests bared to

the air – Men thinking that is

 

what we women want to see, as

we point, and ponder unbaked

baguettes. 39 degrees and we

are pink cuts on a butcher’s slab.

 

 

Skin at 1 a.m.

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I have a teenager, he is 15 nearly. My husband (his dad) died when my son was 3 1/2, and I was there while they turned off the life support. It hit me hard and left me a bit neurotic. Every night, when my son is sleeping, I have to check that he is still alive. It is a deep fear of losing him. I wrote a poem…

Skin at 1 a.m.

Won’t be long now. Soon
you will be too big to be
holding hands with me.
I see beyond the tree

outside the window. 
The sky, infinite – must be 
a new moon as the stars
muse at the aloneness. 

I check you are breathing. 
Brush fingers onto your 
cheek. You wince and 
I know you are sleeping.

It is a strange fixation, 
fearing death in life. I 
feel your palm is hot and
your blood is warm and

you breathe. I am in 
my sanctuary, the rhythms 
of your chest rising
and falling, bringing me 

peace. 




©2022 Sarah Drury, all rights reserved

Daffodils

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A few years ago I was invited to write and perform some poetry with an ecological theme. I have always been reminded of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ every time I see a group of wind turbines, and it inspired me to write this poem:

Daffodils
      
         *after 'Daffodils' - William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
that floats on high o’er fracking lines.
When all at once I saw a crowd,
a host of pure white wind turbines.
Besides the mines, beneath ozone
each one a hand of God, alone.

Continuous as the stars which choke,
polluted in the filthiest way.
They stretched in never-ending droves,
fighting for justice on the smoggy day.
Four hundred I saw at a gaze - 
spiralling heads in polluted haze.


The wind around them danced but they,
battled in their fight for energy.
An eco-warrior could not be gay,
in a battle for survival of ecology
I gazed and gazed – but could not think
what beauty before me, a carbon-free link.

For oft, when on my bed I lie
In despair or in a futile mood,
they spark a hope within my soul,
of a planet-saving attitude.
And then my heart with gratitude shines
and dances with the wind turbines. 

©2022 Sarah Drury

Ben – a poem about homelessness

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I often bump into a young, homeless man on the streets of Scunthorpe, where I live. He has inspired me to write this prose poem.

Ben, who they kick

Sometimes I see you there, in your muck-stained, stinking cocoon, slashed with the silver-slit blades of wicked men. Glinting knives, cowards, sharks eating goldfish, despicable. “He’ll scrub up well”, my nanna would say, but you don’t have a sink and maybe it’s best if the mirror, mirror on the wall was not mocking you, for then the trajectory of the fall would be the depths you’d fallen.

You had a tent, once, in a field, a 100 percent yield on your bed on the cold, grey, slab. My sleeping beauty. Wanted a bite of the Big Apple and ended in Scunthorpe. If the council doesn’t move soon, doesn’t smooth this wrinkle in our ability to love our own. Stop this ‘them and us’. This ‘dead doesn’t matter to us.’ This ‘filth is nothing to us.’

You smiled once, and the sky turned cerulean, I swear. Broken teeth, yellow and golden brown like the heroin which pulls you out of now, into a never. Your eyes were once peridots and now they are black tourmalines reflecting the expanses of a world which, for you, has no walls. How insecure you must feel, how unwrapped like a gift discarded by an ungrateful child.

I wish I could create a new reality for you, Ben. One where you were not the shit at the end of someone’s shoe. Where food fills your stomach not by a passer-by’s “Are you hungry?”, but by mustering up a mean spag bol in your own little gaff. I cannot imagine being the breath in your lungs, all I can offer is a warm voice and a genuine hope that you will make it through the night.

© Sarah Drury 2022

Abstract Dad

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I wrote this poem and drew this portrait as a tribute to my dad, who died when I was 7 years old.

It’s a long time,
Fifty-one years minus 7,
For ‘dad’ to be
An abstract concept.
The one photo
Pretends, from a frame,
That we remember each other,
And it feels unnerving,
Gazes meeting in
Cognition of
Memories never
Made.

I have modelled
My own men;
Collaged works
Of art from
Movies and books,
Myths and magic.
Perfect.
And each one bears
A heart shaped
Like you,
Dad.